Sympathy for Mr Vengeance. (18.)
Directed by Park Chan-wook. 2002.
Starring Song Kang-Ho, Shin Ha-Kyun, Bae Du-Na and Lim Ji-eun. Korean with subtitles. 121 mins. Streaming on BFI Player.
MUBI are currently streaming all of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance trilogy – this, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance - but there are three reasons for me to focus on this, its first instalment. One, at time of writing it's got less than two weeks left on the platform. Two, it's the only one I hadn't seen before. Three, it's the best of them. True, it doesn't have the rich colour composition of his subsequent films, (though it looks pretty good considering its comparatively small budget) and there isn't anything quite as spectacular as the Oldboy hammer fight, but overall it's such an accomplished piece of filmmaking that after it you might look at his other films with a slight sense of disappointment.
Particularly in the first twenty-odd minutes, the film is operating on a level few have matched. The composition of even the simplest scene is perfect; every square inch of the image has some purpose. The pacing is breathtaking but not in the sense of it being a frantic kinetic buzz. It's the precision and economy of the storytelling that astound, his ability to communicate or infer, so much in so little time. It's not an obvious comparison but with all its associative jump-cutting the filmmaker it is closest to is Nicolas Roeg. (Park sneaks a crafty Don't Look Now reference into it.) It largely eschews messing with the chronology but, like in a Roeg film, the viewer is expected to put a lot of the pieces together themselves.
A lot of the beauty of Park's storytelling is not what he includes but what he leaves out. For example, the plot follows a deaf-mute (Shin) trying to raise money for an operation for his sister (Lim) through a kidnapping plot aimed at getting money out of the boss (Song) of the company that sacked him. Integral to that is a kidnapping that is never seen. That's OK – for example, Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law centres on a prison escape that the film ignores.
Such a total absence of handholding is quite a challenge, especially when you're trying to follow it in subtitles. Also, there are times when you feel that maybe the film is cheating just a bit to get to the big effect, that the characters are doing things that are beyond their abilities. That though is an issue I have with all Park's Vengeance films.
It's funny too. All Park's work can be seen as black comedy, but this is the one where that actually translates into laughs. Somehow I've managed to miss seeing this for the best part of two decades, having had the itch passed onto me by a rave review by obese ginger sex pest Harry Knowles on Aintitcoolnews but I'm glad I waited. As someone who was always a little distanced from Park's work, I can now completely see what the fuss is.
Directed by Park Chan-wook. 2002.
Starring Song Kang-Ho, Shin Ha-Kyun, Bae Du-Na and Lim Ji-eun. Korean with subtitles. 121 mins. Streaming on BFI Player.
MUBI are currently streaming all of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance trilogy – this, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance - but there are three reasons for me to focus on this, its first instalment. One, at time of writing it's got less than two weeks left on the platform. Two, it's the only one I hadn't seen before. Three, it's the best of them. True, it doesn't have the rich colour composition of his subsequent films, (though it looks pretty good considering its comparatively small budget) and there isn't anything quite as spectacular as the Oldboy hammer fight, but overall it's such an accomplished piece of filmmaking that after it you might look at his other films with a slight sense of disappointment.
Particularly in the first twenty-odd minutes, the film is operating on a level few have matched. The composition of even the simplest scene is perfect; every square inch of the image has some purpose. The pacing is breathtaking but not in the sense of it being a frantic kinetic buzz. It's the precision and economy of the storytelling that astound, his ability to communicate or infer, so much in so little time. It's not an obvious comparison but with all its associative jump-cutting the filmmaker it is closest to is Nicolas Roeg. (Park sneaks a crafty Don't Look Now reference into it.) It largely eschews messing with the chronology but, like in a Roeg film, the viewer is expected to put a lot of the pieces together themselves.
A lot of the beauty of Park's storytelling is not what he includes but what he leaves out. For example, the plot follows a deaf-mute (Shin) trying to raise money for an operation for his sister (Lim) through a kidnapping plot aimed at getting money out of the boss (Song) of the company that sacked him. Integral to that is a kidnapping that is never seen. That's OK – for example, Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law centres on a prison escape that the film ignores.
Such a total absence of handholding is quite a challenge, especially when you're trying to follow it in subtitles. Also, there are times when you feel that maybe the film is cheating just a bit to get to the big effect, that the characters are doing things that are beyond their abilities. That though is an issue I have with all Park's Vengeance films.
It's funny too. All Park's work can be seen as black comedy, but this is the one where that actually translates into laughs. Somehow I've managed to miss seeing this for the best part of two decades, having had the itch passed onto me by a rave review by obese ginger sex pest Harry Knowles on Aintitcoolnews but I'm glad I waited. As someone who was always a little distanced from Park's work, I can now completely see what the fuss is.
