Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

An appreciative shout-out to Filmbrain for including Bitter Cinema in his overview of film related blogs. Very happy to be among such distinguished company.

And giving credit where credit is due, thanks to Filmbrain's enthusiastic and thoughtful reviews, I have recently been bitten by the Korean Film bug. Saw a scratchy DVD-R of Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance over the weekend. What an exquisitely odd and brilliant film! I was half expecting the fist in your face cinematics that Miike is (in)famous for, but little did I realize that Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance would be such a somber poem on the human costs of vengeance (and I use the term poem advisedly: the film's elliptical structure and visual strokes do not explicate the narrative, nor push it along in a Hollywood fashion, but instead builds layers of emotional and intellectual responses that transcend the narrative --much like a good poem). It plays like a dream, or rather like a nightmare. Imagine yourself in the middle of a darkened highway, totally naked, less one kidney (shoddily removed by a junkie surgeon), deaf and dumb, trying to hitch a ride back home as autos whip by, unconcerned. Our tragic hero Ryu finds himself in such a situation. While the scene can be considered comic, Park's close-ups of Ryu whimpering in the dark has the pathos hitting you like a 2X4. The movie's filled with many scenes like this (another one is when Ryu is holding his girlfriend's hand in the elevator --if you've seen it, you would know how wonderfully touching and tragic it is), and it's the humanity that sets Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance above a lot of know-it-all post-modern slash-and-dash neo-pulp (heads up, Messrs. Miike and Tarantino). It's good to mix a little Truffaut in with your Godard once in a while.