Park Chan-wook (pt. II)

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Oldboy

Lady Vengeance

Greetings, friends, readers, and fellow frequentors of freaky films. If you’re not too shell shocked from last week’s double dose of anxiety-inducing, homoerotically-charged William Friedkin movie mayhem, I wanted to shine a light on another terrifically twisted director this week, one of my absolute, all-time favorites: Park Chan-wook. Yesterday Park Chan-wook celebrated his 60th birthday, this week his acclaimed film Oldboy is remastered and back in theaters after 20 years, and tonight, he becomes one of the most-featured directors on this lil blog of mine. When I first began my journey with South Korean films, I mostly dwelled in the horror realm, which makes sense given how uniquely terrifying South Korean horror is. But when I watched my first Park Chan-wook films, The Handmaiden and Stoker, my obsession was solidified and I fell in deep, cinematic love with this iconic director. His film Thirst might just be my favorite vampire movie of the twenty-first century, and his latest thriller Decision To Leave left me with the same burning desire and awe-struck astonishment that all of his films impress upon me. His films have a way of feeling incredibly detailed and intentional, while operating within total, unpredictable chaos. The layers upon layers upon twists upon flips in a Park Chan-wook film might make your stomach turn or your head spin, but there is always a reliable satisfaction to be found—at least for this critic. Whether it’s a scene of gruesome violence or graphic sex, you can count on Park Chan-wook to deliver an unforgettable experience every single time, with every single frame, with every slice from a blade or lick of a tongue. Tonight’s films were no different, and though they are narratively unrelated, they are all part of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy, which can be watched in any order, but began in 2002 with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, like many of Park Chan-wook’s films, weaves a tangled web of revenge that follows multiple perspectives and motives and hard-truths to be accepted by its protagonists—if you can even call them that. Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance begins with one revenge plot—that of deaf-mute Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun) and his radical leftist girlfriend Yeong-mi’s (Doona Bae) who plot to kidnap a rich executive’s kid in order to receive ransom money to pay for a new kidney (it’s a longer story than that)—but when this plan quickly goes awry, we’re introduced to said executive Mr. Park (Song Kang-ho), who must now exact his own revenge against Ryu and Yeong-mi. Ryu, with his electric green hair and wide-eyed anxiety is easy to root for until things become increasingly messy, further proving that part of the brilliance of a Park Chan-wook experience is knowing that several other shoes are bound to drop, and one should never become too comfortable with who’s side they’re on. In classic Park Chan-wook fashion, everything that can be heightened, exaggerated, and sexualized, is made so in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, along with a reliably-heavy dose of irony and deep, dark, twisted humor. Like so many South Korean films, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance focuses quite a bit on class—how the very rigid lines that are drawn economically are hard to ignore, until they are dismantled by violence, vengeance, and a healthy amount of psycho-sexual terror. I expected every bit of blood, gore, audio-assaulting, and nudity that was featured in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, but even with my growing-knowledge of and appreciation for Park Chan-wook, I was still unprepared for its ending, which effectively hit me over the head and left me significantly bummed out. Typically, I would say this as a negative because I hate to be bummed out (controversial, I know), but this film, like all of Park Chan-wook’s complex filmography, cannot just be boiled down to the complicated emotions they might make you feel. There is so much more to appreciate and comment on than just the discomforting or disorienting nature of his films, but when gathering my thoughts (and attempting to avoid spoilers) I find myself at a loss for words—after watching every single thing he’s made, but especially after this one. I wish I had more to say about the revenge turducken that was Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, but like all films made by the seminal sicko of the evening, you’ll have to see it to believe it. If Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance’s ironic cycle of retribution is like a revenge turducken, then Park Chan-wook’s internationally-renowned 2003 film Oldboy is like a revenge turducken being consumed by a snake who is also eating its own tail. Until Bong Joon-ho’s Best Picture award-winning film Parasite came along, Oldboy was the only South Korean film that most Americans were aware of. Oldboy somewhat-instantly garnered a cult following from international cinephiles like Quentin Tarantino—who’s films are very obviously influenced by Park Chan-wook’s vividly violent aesthetic (but not at all by his subtlety, I suppose…) There are several thematic elements that link Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy together—ants, lists, stairs, kidnapping, waiting, vengeful violence, questionable power dynamics, irony, and lots of lots of cigarettes—but for whatever reason, Oldboy remains to be the most well known and beloved of The Vengeance Trilogy, and to this day can seemingly stand on its own. Oldboy follows Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) a businessman with a wife and daughter and semi-normal life. We meet Oh Dae-su in a jail cell, where he is belligerently drunk and disorderly. His friend Joo-hwan bails him out and takes him to a phone booth to inform his daughter he’ll be coming home soon, but suddenly vanishes, much to Joo-hwan and everyone else’s surprise. After being inexplicably imprisoned in a hotel-like holding cell for 15 years, then being released just as inexplicably one day, Dae-su wanders through the world confused, and determined to find answers. Dae-su has spent the last 15 years thinking, learning from television, trying to escape, and getting into fighting-shape to destroy whoever stands in his way, which comes in handy once he realizes how many people are on his kidnapper’s payroll, and how many he must fight to find the truth. With the help of a hammer, and his new friend and awkwardly-flirty companion Mi-do (Kang Hye-yung), Dae-su makes it his mission to find out who kidnapped him, and why he was held captive for 15 years. The wild and winding road that Oldboy takes you on is one of supreme shock and horror—but not in a gratuitous or needless or exhausting way. The revenge that is executed in Oldboy is earned, but it is far from clean. And just when you think you’ve arrived at your final filmic destination, Park Chan-wook rips the rug out from under you and has you questioning every little detail he presented you with. I didn’t just love Oldboy for its frenetic, free-wheeling, creatively-disgusting violence, nor did I appreciate it solely for its sexually-deviant tendencies (though these things are always a plus.) What I really loved about Oldboy was the seemingly effortless way that its lore was established—how its characters could easily resemble the cast of a Shakespearean play or a Greek tragedy or a John Wick film. Perhaps it is because Oldboy is so established in even our Western canon as significant, or maybe it’s because I’m such an established Park Chan-wook fan, but viewing the film for the first time somehow didn’t feel like the first time at all. This wasn’t a bad thing though, because I immediately felt at ease with whatever uneasy things Oldboy had to offer me—but trust me, I was still completely, utterly, thoroughly shook by its ending. Oldboy is the ultimate action-packed, muddied-moral dilemma of the millennia, and you can see its influence in film and television everywhere you look—from its dark (but not invisible) cinematography, to its long and sustained shots, to its impeccably-choreographed fights, to its aesthetic asymmetry, to its cycle of abuse and death and sacrifice. It is equally funny and abominable, addicting and disturbing, and as with every Park Chan-wook film that I experience, Oldboy will likely stay with me for quite some time. While Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy offer everything one could want from a grimy, maximalistically-violent premise, the final film of The Vengeance Series offered something a little more subtle and refined. There are far less revenge plots in Park Chan-wook’s 2005 film Lady Vengeance, but there is still a decent amount of deplorable behavior that earns its own brutal, ruthless, meticulously-crafted violence. Lady Vengeance follows a young woman named Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), just as she is released from her 13-year stay in prison, for the kidnapping and murder of a young boy. As we soon find out, Geum-ja did not commit this atrocity, but took the fall for the man who did. She spends her 13 years in confinement gaining trust and respect and admiration from her prison peers by taking care of those who need help, and eventually earning the title of “kind-hearted witch” after killing the cellmate who torments everyone else. All of her good deeds were just a part of the preparation for seeking her well-deserved vengeance, and when she is finally free, she ditches her kind-hearted attitude and sports a new look—complete with high heels, chic outfits, and a devilish red eyeshadow that prompts all of her old prison girlies to say “You’ve changed.” The blood and guts and glory of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy came swiftly, chaotically, and without mercy, but Lady Vengeance’s approach to absolution was slower and steadier and somehow done with an even more artistic, even thoughtful eye. Park Chan-wook studied Philosophy in college, and this is made especially apparent in Lady Vengeance, as it paid special attention to every person related to Geum-ja, as well as the complex motivations for each character. And while moral ambiguity and femsploitation are a part of every film in The Vengeance Series, Lady Vengeance felt like it had the richest, and most interesting female characters, facing multiple ethical dilemmas, perfectly distorting the ideals of femininity in the process. Oldboy may be my favorite of this series, which feels uncomfortable to even say about such a messed-up movie, but Lady Vengeance had its own kind of addictively twisted slickness. Park Chan-wook, to quote Australian drag queen Courtney Act, can do sexy. And what’s so intriguing about his brand of eroticism is that pleasure often comes wrapped in or accompanied by displeasure. But in all three of these films, there was no pleasure at all really. There’s a lot of sex—unpleasant, unsexy sex—which makes me appreciate the inherent sexiness of Stoker and The Handmaiden even more. There’s just nothing like Park Chan-wook’s films—regardless of the story being told there will always be an element of surprise, an element of dark comedy, and an element of “what the fuck?”, and for that, I am so thankful. I encourage any other freaky film lovers to go out to the theater to see Oldboy for yourselves, while you can. Just be careful to avoid Spike Lee’s 2013 American remake of Oldboy starring Josh Brolin, because apparently that’s a thing… Thank you and happy belated birthday, Park Chan-wook: Virgo king, sicko auteur, and purveyor of internationally-renowned, fabulously freaky films. Ta ta for now, dear readers 🐙