I'M A CYBORG, BUT THAT'S OK

Park Chan-wook, 2006

Starring: Rain, Im Soo-jung

After making a number of gory, ultraviolent revenge films (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance) and a horror film (the Cut segment in Three... Extremes), Park Chan-wook turned his attention to an entirely different genre: the romantic comedy. Sort of a South Korean take on Amélie set in a mental asylum, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK relates the tale of Young-goon, a young lady who believes she is a cyborg. One day, while working in a radio factory, she cuts her wrist and attempts to put a power cord in her veins to recharge herself. This is interpreted as a suicide attempt and she is institutionalized. Her obsession with being a cyborg also manifests itself in her refusal to eat human food, thinking it will kill her, conversations with machines instead of people, etc. 

Soon she meets Il-soon, a mild schizophrenic/kleptomaniac who believes he can steal other people’s souls. When her condition begins to deteriorate, Il-soon tries to save her and comes up with a way to convince her to eat. He also tries to help her get to the bottom of reoccurring dreams about her grandmother, who was also mentally ill. When Young-goon becomes determined to “detonate” herself, Il-soon accompanies her, secretly intent on protecting her. 

I really liked I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK and it got mostly positive reviews, but there are some definite flaws with this weird, somewhat experimental, kind of endearing film. Using Amélie and (500) Days of Summer as examples, rom-coms typically succeed or fail based on the strength of three things: the male and female leads, their chemistry/developing relationship, and the side characters. Despite the lack of a developed male lead for most of the film, Amélie works based on the strength of Audrey Tautou and the well-written, funny side characters, as well as the concluding romantic chemistry between the two leads. (500) Days of Summer fails because the only character that is remotely interesting or developed is Joseph Gordon Levitt, who spends the bulk of the film either whining or pining in neither humorous nor compelling ways. 

I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK succeeds because the two lead actors, pop star and actor Rain and Im Soo-jung (A Tale of Two Sisters), are dedicated to their roles and give believable performances. As with Amélie, the film concludes on a hopeful, positive note, and focuses on their budding romance. But unlikely the quirky and often odd side characters in Amélie, the other patients in the mental hospital are often weird for the sake of being weird and lack any other purpose or character development. There are scenes of wonderful surrealism, such as Young-goon’s fantasy sequences, but also plenty of moments likely to confuse less attentive viewers. Park’s constant need to make things weird takes away some of the heart that could have made this film truly successful. 

Still, it’s nice to see a change of pace from Park’s previous films and to know that he is interested in challenging himself. For some reason the film never found its way to the U.S. outside of festival dates and a DVD release from Pathfinder. It is also currently streaming on Netflix. Cyborg is worth watching if you’re a big Park fan or if you enjoy quirky romantic comedies, despite the scattered, somewhat forced plot and lack of cohesion in the narrative. Park’s usually colorful sets, imaginative visuals and decent CGI work are delightful, as always, and he gets a solid handle on the central romance in the film. At the least, it is worth a rental and anyone who loved Wristcutters: A Love Story (which I hated), is going to be over the moon about Cyborg. 

LADY VENGEANCE

Park Chan-wook, 2005

Starring: Yeong-ae Lee, Min-sik Choi, Shi-hoo Kim, Yea-young Kwon

Chinjeolhan Geumjassi aka Sympathy for Lady Vengeance or Lady Vengeance literally translates as “The Kind Ms. Geum-ja” and concerns a woman framed for murder who seeks revenge when she is released from over a decade in prison. Lee Geum-ja confessed to the kidnapping and murder of a young boy because she was blackmailed by the real killer, a schoolteacher named Mr. Baek. The film jumps from her life in prison to her present quest for vengeance. In prison she was given the nickname “the kind Ms. Geum-ja,” because of the sweet, selflessness acts she performed on behalf of other prisoners. After she is released, she discards her kind persona, dons red eye make-up and manipulates many of the released prisoners into helping her with her plan for revenge. 

Baek kidnapped Geum-ja’s baby daughter as blackmail and part of her plan is to track down her now teenaged daughter and make amends. Baek, meanwhile, figures out her plan and ambushes his girlfriend (another ex-con put in place by Geum-ja) and attempts to have Geum-ja and her daughter kidnapped. This does not go particularly well for Baek, who is almost killed, until Geum-ja discovers something terrible. Baek has souvenirs from multiple child victims. She discovers tapes he made of the other murdered children and contacts their parents and the detective in charge of the boy’s case, who always believed she was innocent. 

The group converges in an old, abandoned school where Baek used to work as a teacher. Geum-ja shows the parents the videos of their children and proposes that they vote to turn him in or kill him themselves. After some difficult discussion, they choose the latter option, with each parent taking part in the murder and burial. They have an uncomfortable celebration with a cake Geum-ja has made and sing “Happy Birthday” to their dead children. Geum-ja brings her daughter a white cake, symbolic of purity and absence of sin. Her daughter offers it to Geum-ja instead, who sobs and buries her face in the cake. 

The concluding to chapter to Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy after Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and the more famous Oldboy, Lady Vengeance is a different film from its predecessors for three primary reasons. First, Baek is indisputably a villain with no sympathetic backstory or motivations. Second, though the film is driven by a heroine, it is essentially a tale of group retribution. Finally, though Geum-ja has a detailed plan for revenge, she is primarily concerned with atonement. The film is seeped with religious imagery, dipping into both Christian and Buddhist symbolism for themes of forgiveness and confession. Ritual activity is more important than in either of the previous films and, as in Oldboy, food caries a major symbolic significance that repeats throughout the film. 

At its heart, Lady Vengeance is a stylized melodrama, which is perhaps a nod to Lee Young Ae’s status as one of the most popular actresses in Korea. Geum-ja’s  transformation from sweet saint of the prison to black-clad demon of vengeance is also, in part, a transformation of Lee’s persona. Though the film has the same visual flair and attention to detail as the rest of the trilogy, it is less subtle or minimalistic than Sympathy but not as flashy or noir-influenced as Oldboy. Park moves from rich colors and textures towards an emphasis on black, white and red. There are actually two versions of Lady Vengeance - the theatrical release and a “Fade to Black and White” version, where the colors are gradually leached from the film. The score by Choi Seung-hyun is baroque-influenced and includes a version of the theme from Vivaldi’s "Cessate, omai cessate," where a woman sings about getting revenge on the man who betrayed her. 

Lady Vengeance did very well in Korean theatres, but received mixed reviews worldwide, probably due to the very different nature of the film. Though it is somewhat flawed in terms of plot development, it deals with more mature issues than either of the previous films. Park questions the nature of trauma and catharsis, as well as what happens when revenge is complete, how it transforms identity and whether or not we can ever change back into the person we once were. 

The strong bond between Lady Vengeance and the other two films of the trilogy lies in thematic content. They all contains the same elements of irony and the absurd, as well as similar plot points like kidnapping, imprisonment, communication barriers and domestic tragedy. Park also uses a lot of the same actors, including Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik. Looking out for all the overlapping cameos is like the “Where’s Waldo” of Korean revenge cinema, particularly because Park and fellow horror director Kim Ji-woon frequently share cast members. Many of the same actors can be found in Kim’s A Bittersweet Life, A Tale of Two Sisters, and I Saw the Devil, where Choi Min-sik plays the villain. 

As in Jacobean revenge tragedy, each film in Park’s trilogy is set up around a murder mystery, characters struggle with madness, the violence is sensational if almost comic and there are even occasional visits from ghosts. Fantasy is particularly important in all three films and Park takes particular care to stress that revenge and revenge cinema represent a fantasy and the purging of wrongdoing through sadomasochistic spectacle only results in tragedy and disaster. I suspect that some of his plot points are not completely believable for the simple fact that verisimilitude is not a high priority and is sacrificed in favor of emotion. All three films state irrevocably that life is pain and the only possible salvation comes from love, even though it is often another source of pain. 

As with the rest of the trilogy, Lady Vengeance comes highly recommended. It is available on DVD from Tartan Video, which includes a making of, interviews, and several commentaries. 

OLDBOY

Park Chan-wook, 2003

Starring: Min-sik Choi, Ji-tae Yu, Hye-jeong Kang

Following the first film in his Vengeance trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), the more popular middle entry, Oldboy, is based on a manga of the same name by Nobuaki Minegishi and Garon Tsuchiya. On the night of his young daughter’s birthday, Oh Dae-su is released from the police station for being drunk and disorderly, then promptly goes missing. He wakes up in a single room where he will spend the next fifteen years. He is only given fried dumplings to eat and is otherwise cared for while unconscious. His only contact with the outside world is television where he learns he has been framed for his wife’s murder and his daughter has been given up for adoption. This drives him to regularly hallucinate and attempt to kill himself. Determined to one day get revenge, he keeps a detailed journal of all his wrongdoings and physically trains for the day he will escape.

Suddenly he is released and receives a cell phone and wallet from a stranger. He wanders into a restaurant and a sushi chef, Mi-do, feeds and then cares for him, taking him home after he collapses. His mysterious kidnapper calls him and messages Mi-do on her computer. Suspicious of her, Dae-su flees and manages to track down the building where he was held captive based on his discovery of the restaurant the dumplings were ordered from. He tortures the building manager, but gets no information and has to fight his way out of the building in an impressive (and now famous) long-take single shot. A man, Woo-jin, places the wounded Dae-su into a taxi and sends him to Mi-do’s apartment. Woo-jin soon identifies himself as the kidnapper and says that Mi-do will die if Dae-su can’t figure out why he was kidnapped and imprisoned, but if he succeeds, Woo-jin will commit suicide.

SPOILERS: Skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t seen the film yet. This is where the whole thing begins to come off the rails, sadly. Mi-do and Dae-su develop a romantic relationship as Dae-su discovers that he and Woo-jin went to school together. Woo-jin had a secret, incestuous relationship with his sister that Dae-su discovered and accidentally spread a rumor about. The rumor grew out of control and led to Woo-jin’s sister killing herself. When he confronts Woo-jin with this information, Woo-jin presents Dae-su with a photo album showing that Mi-do is actually his long lost daughter, now grown up. Woo-jin orchestrated their relationship, partly through the use of hypnosis. After going mad with grief, Dae-su cuts out his own tongue, begging Woo-jin not to tell Mi-do. Woo-jin agrees and then kills himself. Dae-su uses the same hypnotist to forget the horrible secret and he and Mi-do go off into the wintry countryside. It is unclear whether the hypnosis was successful. 

Oldboy received some mixed reviews, but for the most part was critically acclaimed and did well in the box office, especially in Korea. Though it was nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes, it won the Grand Prix, or Best Director’s award. This exceedingly stylized film is the flashiest of the trilogy, playing out like a mash-up of David Fincher, Ichi the Killer, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, the latter of which is referenced in the film. Like its sibling films, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance, Oldboy leaves the viewer feeling as though they have seen much more devastating violence than actually occurs on screen, though Oldboy does exhibit more sex and gruesome violence than either of the other Vengeance films. 

The impressive first half is heavily influenced by The Count of Monte Cristo and a handful of noir films. Initially, the cause of Dae-su’s vengeance is that he has been imprisoned and framed for his wife’s murder. He is convinced that someone is taking revenge on him for the horrible life he has led, but his motivation soon shifts. His wife’s murder is not mentioned beyond the first quarter of the film and his primary cause for retribution seems to be the loss of fifteen years of his life. Oldboy is almost completely driven by a strong performance from Choi Min-sik, who brings rage, pathos, and a great amount of complexity to the role. The second act is harrowing, but also unravels and gets hung up on clumsy plot devices and the final twist. Park does attempt to bring us into the world of classic Greek-style tragedy, where bad becomes worse and the only possibly salvation is a dreadful act of mutilation and subsequent banishment. 

Critics of Oldboy attest that it is a visually flashy exploitation film with a lot of dazzle but little substance. The hypnotism subplot and twist ending strain credulity at best, but Park is still forcing us to question the merit of violence and vengeance, as well as the aftermath of these calculated acts. The film comes recommended, particularly for fans of violent revenge cinema. There is a DVD from Tartan Asia Extreme and a special edition 2-disc Blu-ray from Tartan that includes a ton of special features. 

SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE

Park Chan-wook, 2002

Starring: Kang-ho Song, Ha-kyun Shin, Doona Bae, Ji-Eun Lim

Korea’s Park Chan-wook has had a cinematic career primarily steeped in horror. His Vengeance trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance come directly from a shock-horror-exploitation tradition, as well as Cut, his segment for the Three...Extremes Asian horror anthology, Thirst, his vampire film from 2009, and Stoker, his upcoming film said to be influenced by Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Hitchcock’s domestic serial killer drama Shadow of a Doubt. 

Park's three revenge films are widely different in visual style, but share similar thematic concerns and philosophical issues. All of these films deal with intense, painful relationships between parents and children, as well as siblings. This marks them as domestic revenge films, one of the most popular themes in the larger revenge genre. Park's trilogy questions the purpose of violence and vengeance and speculates what comes after. Confession, atonement and forgiveness are also themes of increasing importance, culminating in Lady Vengeance.

And though Park’s trilogy wanders somewhere between Korean/East Asian horror and Western revenge cinema, it also borrows liberally from English Renaissance drama, namely the Jacobean revenge tragedy made most famous by works like Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Common characteristics include murder mysteries, intricate plotting, descents into madness, exaggerated, almost comic violence, ghosts, and the wholesale destruction of most of the characters. These types of plays also exhibit a certain rationalism and emotional detachment in the heroes, who are determined to follow through with cold, calculated revenge until the bitter end, even if it means sacrificing their own lives. Revenge tragedies also explore the consequences of political power, absolutism and corruption, which is particularly relevant in South Korea cinema due to the aftermath of a despotic government in the ‘80s and difficulties maintaining peace with North Korea. 

Boksuneun Naui Geot aka Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance directly translates to Vengeance is Mine, a more fitting title considering that sympathy falls short in this bleak, isolating film. A deaf-mute, Ryu, cares for his terminally ill sister, who is on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. Unfortunately he gets laid off, panics, and uses the severance pay and one of his own kidneys to make a black market trade for an organ compatible with his sister’s blood type. After his surgery, the organ dealers disappear and soon the hospital tells him they have found a match if he still has the money. His girlfriend, Yeong-mi, comes up with a plan to kidnap his ex-boss’s young daughter for ransom money. Everything goes well until Ryu’s sister discovers what he has done and kills herself. When the grief-stricken Ryu takes the little girl along to bury his sister, she accidentally drowns. 

Dong-jin, the girl’s father, is consumed by grief and plans revenge. He finds Yeong-mi and tortures her to death, despite her warning that she is part of an anarchistic terrorist group who will seek retribution. Ryu, meanwhile, has found and murdered the family of organ dealers. When he learns of Yeong-mi’s death, he swears revenge on Dong-jin, who has been waiting for Ryu at his apartment. He overpowers Ryu and takes him to the river where his daughter died, violently drowning him. While burying the body, Dong-jin is stabbed to death by a group of mysterious revolutionaries. 

Successful in the Korean box office, Sympathy garnered some worldwide attention from Oldboy's later fame, but should be regarded as a near-masterpiece in its own right. Much of the film’s strength lies with its impressive visual style and Park’s strict attention to detail. There is some coldly perfect cinematography by Kim Byeong-il, despite the fact that the film is bright and beautiful with resonating green tones. The sound design is also impressive, with a careful mixture of silence, dialogue, sign language, written notes and intertitles, as well as a sparsely used jazz score. The closing credits are particularly chilling, as we fade out on Dong-jin gurgling and choking on his own blood. 

Sympathy is not a very accessible film because it is glacially paced and centers around deeply isolated characters, a theme that runs through the trilogy as a whole. In the first half of the film many of the dramatic moments and emotional reactions are not shown on screen. Park uses some great, incongruous cuts to achieve this, which work to disorient the viewer and disrupt the pacing and tension, but with purpose and control. The inability of the characters to interact or communicate with one another is established visually by Park’s insistence on bisecting shots and oddly framed scenes. On the surface level, the story is fraught with difficulties and plot holes and is almost absurdly complex, but this seems to be intentional. Park's film is about the pointless nature of revenge, about the impotence of rage and the frustration of alienation. 

It is a staunchly pessimistic film, but is also full of a charming sort of irony. While it can’t accurately be described as a black comedy, it is packed full of quick moments of irony and absurdism that give it additional depth. Sympathy's only real weakness is its sprawling, convoluted plot, made more confusing by the frequent jump cuts. Many of the events don’t make a whole lot of sense, but all of these acts lead to a spiraling path of violence and murder. Most of the violence is implied, but there is a level of brutality that leaves most viewers certain they’ve seen more than has actually been shown. 

Sympathy is a cold, aloof, emotionally void exercise in the purpose and execution of vengeance. Park refuses to provide a moral compass and strips away the catharsis usually implicit in genre films. Both Ryu and Dong-jin are sympathetic, but we are ultimately unable to empathize with either. Despite his later explorations in confession and absolution, the only possible outcome in Sympathy is the finalizing silence of death. With his next film, Oldboy, he graduates to the question of what comes after revenge and whether or not identity and emotion can be rehabilitated. 

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance comes highly recommended for fans of revenge films and/or Korean horror. It is available on DVD in a basic edition from Tartan Video.