By Jennifer Flinn
Third time's the charm? Not so for Park Chan-wook, who can't quite finish what he started in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, his concluding chapter to the Revenge Trilogy.
With Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Jinjeolhan Geumjasshi -- literally, "Gentle Miss Geumja"), Park Chan-wook finally gives us the last installment of his Revenge Trilogy. Along with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy, Lady Vengeance completes Park's notorious and controversial meditation on the meaning and ramifications of revenge and violence. Just as with the first two chapters, Lady Vengeance is chocked full of shocking violence, outrageous plotting, and stylized shots that are carefully calibrated to traumatize and stun the audience. Still, the piece feels less like an ending piece than a bridge between the wildly distinct first two movies. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was the first, most ponderous of the three, happy and content to take its time slowly bogging the audience down with a steady spiral of dread deeds. The middle installment, Oldboy, clipped along at a frenetic, exhilarating pace that left viewers breathless and astounded with the sheer audacity of it all. Lady Vengeance sits uncomfortably in the middle ground, sharing many stylistic quirks with Oldboy but some of the lethargy of Mr. Vengeance. It lurches haphazardly as if Park wasn't quite sure which speed he wanted to move at.
Lady Vengeance opens with the release of Miss Geumja after serving more than a decade for the kidnapping and murder of a young boy that she may or may not have been complicit in committing. Despite the violence of her crime, during her time in jail Geumja gained a reputation for saintliness among the other prisoners. Her kindnesses and mercy are double-edged, however, and the ambiguities of her actions raise questions of the role of intent. Is Geumja a living saint or a vicious murderer? The delicate balance of the flashbacks to prison is the highlight of the film. If Park had focused his movie more on this portion of Geumja's life he might have made the perfect concluding film for his trilogy as Geumja's fellow inmates now conspire with her to gain revenge against the man who left her to take the fall for his crimes.
Unfortunately the adroit set up doesn't graft well with the other major storylines and is left to languish. The story of Geumja's lost daughter, now being raised in Australia, is well constructed and continues some of Park's themes from Mr. Vengeance, but never seems to matter much to the outcome. The actual tale of Geumja's post-release life is woefully unconnected to the flashbacks and powerful female inmates that we met in the first half of the film. The brilliant bits of character construction and exposition are entirely wasted and never work to flesh out the lurching second half.
The biggest failure of Lady Vengeance is the lack of motivation for our ultimate villain, Choi Min-shik, in an unfortunately brief role as an English teacher. The genius of Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was in watching how revenge caused characters to slowly lose their humanity as their retribution spiraled out of control. But here our main villain is never fully explicated and remains a cipher and unknowable evil. Ultimately Lady Vengeance is the most vulnerable to the critiques that have plagued Park's trilogy from the beginning about being gratuitously dark, violent, and grim while valuing style at the expense of real meaning.
While the whole may not add up to more than its parts, some of those parts are astounding. This film should forever set to rest questions of Lee Yeong-ae's acting ability. Her work here cleverly plays off her role as palace cook and doctor in the hit TV drama Daegangeum (Jewel in the Palace) and is breathtakingly eerie. The maintenance of this impenetrable and ambiguous façade for the entirety of the film is enough to make any actress sweat, but Lee makes Geumja believable in the extremes of kindness and cruelty. It is without a doubt her best performance yet. Choi does the best he can with a very slender role. As usual with Park's films, the background characters are all colorfully and skillfully portrayed, and at times it becomes a game to see how many famous actors have cameos (including Yoo Jin-tea from Oldboy, and both Shin Ha-gyun and Song Kang-ho from Mr. Vengeance).
As can be expected from Park, the film is stylish and has its own not-quite-reality aesthetic. And no one can accuse him of not having original ideas. Unfortunately, Lady Vengeance ultimately suffers from an excess of ideas that never gell together and form a coherent whole. It reaches neither the depths of wasted humanity and despair from Mr. Vengeance nor the operatic grisliness of Oldboy. With a little more discipline and some selective pruning, Geumja could have been the best of the trilogy, but instead it's an unsteady third wheel.
Published: Thursday, May 25, 2006
