re:mote voices

Title: Sympathy For Lady Vengeance
Cast: Yeong-ae Lee, Min-sik Choi
Director: Chan-wook Park

Sympathy For Lady Vengeance starts with a church band, all dressed as Santa Claus, waiting for Geum-ja Lee. Lee is just out of prison after a 13 year sentence, while in there she was a saint, a friend to everyone. Yet she also had the nickname "The Witch" and was in prison for abducting and murdering a six-year-old boy. One thing quickly becomes clear though, now that Lee is out of prison she has changed, from the fragile innocent she has become cold and hard. For 13 years she has been planning revenge, determined to have her vengeance on the man that put her away.

Sympathy For Lady Vengeance is an initially episodic film, piecing together events through little vignettes. Upon her release from prison Lee visits each of the girls that she shared a cell with, each visit providing another view of Lee, another part of her history, another fragment of her plan. With this Sympathy For Lady Vengeance is different from its predecessors, taking a more sedate approach, allowing more time for the thing to come together. Even so, Lady Vengeance is undoubtedly part of Chan-wook Park's revenge trilogy. The parallels are clear, Lee has been in prison for a child kidnapping just like Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, there is even one scene where Lee echoes dialogue from that first film. Then there is Old Boy, a man detained for 15 years in a cell for his perceived crimes, compared to a woman detained for 13 years for hers. Additional nods to Park's previous films are made in the casting Yeong-ae Lee was in the earlier film Joint Security Area, while Min-sik Choi is particularly recognisable from Old Boy, Kang-ho Song also appears, familiar from both Joint Security Area and Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance.

Reportedly Park was exhausted from the violence of his previous two revenge films. So with Lady Vengeance he wanted to explore the topic from a different view, which is part of why his lead is a woman in this film. There are no gang fights here, rather there are dream sequences and a different kind of violence. With Lady Vengeance there is some ambiguity about the violence, about the sense of justice, mixed in with our celebration of violence, the celebrity that comes with that - but there is no ambiguity about the evil, here Park gives us his most despicable character to date. A wolf in sheep's clothing as the dream would have it.

While I could well be the only person that sees it, I felt a slight influence from Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Old Boy. Something about the tone of the film, the direction, a certain playfulness for all the dark. Sympathy For Lady Vengeance takes that further, there is an undercurrent of magic realism, of a different way of looking at things. Certainly the detour to Australia contributes to that, bursting the bubble of this being just a Korean film, taking it on to a greater stage. But then that is not really surprising, Park has gained a reputation over the last few years, particularly with the success of Old Boy. For me Park is undoubtedly the most striking director to have come out of this current crop of Korean film makers, and while Sympathy For Lady Vengeance is certainly less accessible or violent than Old Boy it could well be his masterpiece.