Let’s Get It Going

And now, without further ado, the Top 25 begins.

25. Boksuneun naui geot (2002, Directed by Chan-wook Park)

AKA: “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance”

We begin the countdown with a movie which serves to teach a very valuable lesson that will apply itself regularly as we continue: not everything on here should be taken as a recommendation. “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” is an engrossing cinematic experience, but it is also very Korean, quite methodical, and incredibly brutal. That I adore the film does not alter the fact that many of you reading should not seek it out.

The opening volley of Park’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” “Vengeance” is typically overshadowed by its better known older sibling, “Oldboy.” While the latter film is also a powerful experience (and features one of the best fight scenes ever filmed), I connect much more with this story. It starts quite slowly, almost gracefully, as we meet a deaf young man named Ryu, whose sister is struggling with a serious medical condition. Desperate for the money to pay for her operation, Ryu turns to his best friend, Cha Yeong-mi, a rebellious political activist, and she advises him to orchestrate a very careful kidnapping (her ideals make her comfortable with robbing a corporate fat-cat). The plan is simple: abduct a young girl from a rich man, treat her kindly while making the demands, and return her before she has any idea of what was going on. Practically a victimless crime, until things begin to go wrong.

Park claims that all three of his vengeance movies (this one, “Oldboy,” and “Lady Vengeance”) are about the futility and amorality of seeking revenge, but only this one really sends that message home. The moral of the film is that retribution steals your free will, your ability to make a conscious decision about how you will react to events. The characters is “Vengeance” all intend to pay back how they were wronged in proportion, but inevitably the equation becomes unbalanced, and they must go to greater and more unreasonable lengths for their satisfaction. By the closing credits, three lives have been consumed by violence and grief.

Tonally, the script is somewhere between Shakespeare’s tragedies and Hitchcock’s most twisted thrillers, blending the grandiosity of the former with the maddening psychoses and shock-tactics of the latter. The visual language of the film is sublime: Park composes his frames as if he painted each one by hand, avoiding long tracts of dialogue in favor of soaking his audience in atmosphere. Like most great cinema, “Vengeance” finds the filmic quality of its story, telling it in a style that would not convey in a novel, play, or even a television show. Reading the script wouldn’t even get you close to the experience of the movie.

The violence is horrific, although unlike a lot of the Asian cinema I have seen, it does not serve to entice excitement. Kubrick used to complain that people were only shocked by “A Clockwork Orange” because they expected sanitized violence, which he refused to provide, and the same is true here. The body count is far lower than any Bond film, as is the screen time spent on physical conflict, but what time Park does employ he uses. Killing is not done by professionals in this movie, it is not clean or polite, and when it’s over, we share in the emptiness the characters experience. The point is for you to not like it.

Ryu is clumsy and foolish, so he might not seem a compelling lead, but his purity of heart and unselfish devotion to his sister are compelling. Cha Yeong-mi provides an interesting foil and romantic interest for him, but they are exactly the kinds of criminals that end up on the nightly news.

Park Dong-jin, the rich executive at the center of their plot, is the other end of the spectrum: a need for retaliation turns him cold, unfeeling, unrelenting. Everything he sets out to do he accomplishes, but he never stops to consider what sort of bedfellow his mindless devotion will make once the quest is complete. His feelings are understandable, any father would want to react that way to his daughter being kidnapped, but by completing our dark fantasies, he shows us how truly ignorant a human being can be to the meaning of justice. His story is the reality-check version of “Taken,” an enjoyable but utterly ridiculous movie which has little regard for the moral price of taking life. Although “Vengeance” is more violent, “Taken” embraces violence.

I’ve only seen this movie twice, both times were very recent, but it made an immediate impression on me. With a few more years, no doubt it will scale the list as I grow to know it better. For now, my Top 25 remains something of an old boys’ club, so “Vengeance” will have to be content where it is.