Review: Sympathy for Lady Vengeance at TKFF

Perhaps it's easy to compare director Park Chan-wook to Quentin Tarantino but this would be a mistake for several reasons. Park Chan-wook's film are known for their depictions of ultra -violence but they are done in such a poetic way that you almost forget that what you are watching is abhorrent. Ultimately the violence is part of the story and everything flows as one. Quentin Tarantino is a director but Park Chan-wook is an artist. The opening credits for Sympathy for Lady Vengeance are really beautiful (video clip above). It's little details like this that make a film truly memorable for me. It's not essential to have beautiful opening credits which makes having them really special. 

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, stars Lee Young-ae as Geum-ja, a beautiful young woman who is imprisoned at the age of nineteen for abducting and murdering a five year old boy. It is obvious from the beginning that Geum-ja has been framed for this crime. However, flashbacks to her arrest show her vigorously professing her guilt. The film begins with her release from prison as she sets out to enact a revenge plot that she has been planning for thirteen years. She begins by visiting each of her old cell mates and as she does so each of these women has their own flashback about Geum-ja's prison days. I enjoyed these flashbacks as I felt each once showed a different facet of the complex Geum-ja. In prsion Geum-ja has two nicknames, "Kind-hearted Geum-ja" and "The Witch". This may seem contradictory but essentially there are two side to Geum-ja and these two sides are split even further still. She is a complex woman, one that would give a kidney to her cell-mate like she was lending her a pair of shoes but also someone that has no qualms about killing.

Choi Min-sik is excellent as the bad guy, Mr. Baek. It's difficult to imagine how much more you could hate a child killer but Choi Min-sik manages to add that je ne sais quoi to make Mr. Baek especially detestable.

Although this is obviously meant to be quite a dark film, there were wonderful elements of whimsy that added a fairy-tale quality (not unlike the style of Jean Pierre Jeunet). These included Geum-ja's clothes (very Ann Sui), the use of narration, Geum-ja's amazing cakes and nearly every scene with Geum-ja's precocious daughter. 

 Italian poster artwork for Sympathy for Lady Vengeance

Korean poster artwork for Sympathy for Lady Vengeance