Sympathizing With "Lady Vengeance"

I admit that I have trouble with many Asian films, which is ironic because I'm Asian-American myself. But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. I haven't been exposed to much Asian popular culture. Sure, I like my period dramas and think inappropriate thoughts about Nicholas Tse and Takeshi Kaneshiro, but I don't engage with the Asian media to nearly the same degree, and hardly anything outside of anime, art house cinema, and Hong Kong gangster films. So when watching the first two installments of South Korean director Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance Trilogy, "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" and "Oldboy," I was thrown off by the style and tone of the films.

Gory violence was mixed with domestic melodrama, the hardest crimes fueled by the tenderest fuzzy feelings of love and parenthood. Innocence was mercilessly squashed, yet good intentions and strength of feeling seemed to count for everything. The characters were often wildly emotional, breaking down in tears or throwing over-the-top tantrums at the slightest provocation. And yet they were strangely stoic or unmoved in other situations where I would have expected a reaction. I spent a lot of time just trying to nail down what constituted a normal emotional state, so I could have some baseline reference to compare to. And this isn't even getting into the more typical cultural differences, like "Oldboy" taking for granted that everyone believes in the effectiveness of hypnotism, to the extent that its infallibility is a major plot point in the film.

So when I say I liked "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance," the last installment of the Vengeance Trilogy, better than the previous two, it comes with a great big asterisk, for my own cultural disconnect with the material. "Lady Vengeance" is the most straightforward of Park's tales of revenge, its characters display the least amount of confusing behavior, and thanks to its comparatively happy ending, it's more of a crowd-pleaser. I also finally realized, about halfway through the film, how much dark and deadpan humor Park used in his work. I know a lot of the laugh lines in "Mr. Vengeance" and "Oldboy" must have gone over my head, and now I want to go back and try to figure out what I missed. Cross-cultural communication issues even arise in the story, as the heroine reunites with a teenage daughter raised by Westerners, forcing her to simplify and spell out her thoughts and actions in ways that are more universal and transcendent.

Like the other films in the Vengeance Trilogy, "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" examines cycles of revenge, parent-child relationships, the effects of extended incarceration, social disconnection, and the unintended consequences of seemingly innocuous acts. "Lady Vengeance" also deals heavily with themes of redemption, forgiveness, and atonement. Our heroine is a woman named Lee Geum-Ja (Lee Young Ae) who has just been released from prison after serving thirteen years for the kidnapping and murder of a five-year-old boy. Her case was a media sensation, because she was only nineteen when convicted, and Geum-Ja cultivated a reputation for being a kind-hearted, angelic figure in prison, though not above using extreme measures to deal with problematic fellow inmates. Upon her release, however, she drops the facade, puts on blood-red eyeshadow, and starts calling in favors. Geum-Ja is out for revenge.

Eventually, we learn the target of her ire is Mr. Baek (Choi Min-Sik), though I won't reveal the nature of their relationship because of potential spoilers. The lead-up to their confrontation is lengthy, and Geum-Ja first makes a detour to Australia to track down the baby she gave up for adoption, now a plucky teenager named Jenny (Kwon Yea-Young). Despite not speaking a word of Korean, Jenny follows Geum-Ja back to South Korea, insistent on learning why her mother abandoned her. The girl's presence lingers at the edge of the audience's consciousness and Geum-Ja's as the narrative becomes darker and bloodier, its early prevalence of warm pastel colors giving way to a monochromatic chill. In the end, the connection between mother and daughter seems the only thing keeping Geum-Ja from becoming a real monster, though it also spurs one of the most truly spectacular and satisfying revenges I've ever seen onscreen.

"Lady Vengeance" surprised me in a lot of ways, not only for its inventive story, but for its oddly lighthearted tone. I had been steeling myself for an especially brutal slasher flick after hearing about some of the more violent bits, but I needn't have worried. There is some explicit violence, but it's brief and often presented in an unexpected way. The blood-letting itself is never played for laughs, but the circumstances around it often are. There's a brilliant sequence during the Grand Guginol finale where a group of nervous killers are making small-talk together, revealing class divisions and family insecurities. The situation is terribly serious, but the director keeps slipping in odd reaction shots and incongruous bits of normality that just left me smiling in spite of myself. He winds up subverting the whole notion of revenge, showing the smallness and the silliness of his would-be avenging angels, even as he feeds the audience's bloodlust.

Keeping the whole venture from becoming a farce is the excellent performance of Lee Young Ae as Geum-Ja, whose melancholy yearning for redemption provides the film with a depth of sentiment that is very affecting. When all of the character's masks and pretenses are finally stripped away, we're left with a woman who is truly sorry for what she's done and who is deserving of our sympathies. I'm still not sure if Park Chan-Wook made a better film, or if I finally got used to the way he makes them, but "Lady Vengeance" was a great experience and it's certainly my favorite of his trilogy. I think it might even be my favorite South Korean film, not that I've seen very many. But at least now I have a better baseline for comparison.