Vengeance Without Redemption

LADY VENGEANCE

Directed by Chan-wook Park

At the New York Film Festival Sept. 30 and Oct. 2

THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO

Directed by Jane Anderson

It's possible to respect the emotional consequences of violence while depicting it in a highly artificial way, and if you doubt it, there's a brilliant conversation piece now showing in New York that may convince you otherwise. But it's not David Cronenberg's faux-serious genre pastiche A History of Violence. It's Chan-wook Park's Lady Vengeance, which plays the New York Film Festival this week in advance of its scheduled opening next spring.

The final installment of Park's revenge trilogy improves on the problematic Oldboy and the more complex and powerful Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance by framing its story as a kind of fairy tale, centered not on a testosterone-addled man, but on a guilty ex-con heroine (Park's first) and recounted by a third-person female narrator at some time in the future. The movie's widescreen storybook images—complete with geometrically framed, poetic dissolves and the most dazzling, limited-omniscient wide shots this side of a Kubrick movie—suggest an attempt to find redemption amid horrendous butchery. But to his credit, Park seems to conclude that such a thing isn't possible, even in movies.

Park lulls academic-minded film buffs with a muscular but elegant display of pure technique. Tone-wise, Lady Vengeance seems to occupy the same R-rated storybook subgenre as Wes Anderson's movies, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. But Park keeps pulling the rug out from under the viewer by making every character, no matter how minor, as raggedly complex and emotionally indefinable as a real person. (A male-female team of inept bank robbers expresses sadness that there are no co-ed prisons.) Every shot, cut and line evokes not just one feeling but several, and they're often in conflict. Park makes it impossible for film buffs to hide behind spot-the-references glibness. To watch Lady Vengeance (originally titled "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance") is to be perpetually unsure of how to feel. The only certainty is that the old knee-jerk movie reactions don't work anymore. Such instability is a welcome counterweight to the Tarantino-Cronenberg approach, which views characters mainly as droll genre types and treats plot as a succession of Film History 101 tropes and setpieces.

Korean TV star Young-ae Lee plays Geum-ja Lee, recently released from prison after serving a 13-year stint for kidnapping and murdering a schoolboy. (Warning, plot spoilers ahead.)

Soon enough, we learn that while Geum-ja bears some responsibility for what happened, she's not the only guilty party; as a pregnant teenager, she fell under the spell of Mr. Baek (Oldboy star Min-sik Choi), a schoolteacher and secret psychopath who kidnapped, tortured and murdered a succession of children. Geum-ja's confession to police was concocted—the result of her own tremendous guilt and police and media pressure—but her remorse is genuine, and it expresses itself in a placid, at times nearly catatonic demeanor. (Lee's close-ups are marvels of mask-like suggestion; you sense her pain even as you believe she could hide it from others.) Her mostly secret good Samaritan work in prison pays off when her fellow ex-cons—most of whom were damaged goods going in, just like Lee—help her atone for her participation in the killing by punishing Mr. Baek. This punishment takes the form of an elaborate, protracted kidnapping designed to make the schoolteacher suffer some version of the pain he inflicted on his helpless young charges.

What might have been a cinematically self-conscious exercise in eye-for-an-eye cliché unfolds with startling richness. As in Kill Bill, the heroine's now adolescent daughter Jenny (Kown Yea-Young) serves as a living reminder of the normal life that was taken from her. But unlike Bill, Vengeance digs deep into this cliché and finds emotional and moral truth. Jenny's life—indeed, her innocence—represents the heroine's successful, if inadvertent, avoidance of Old Testament punishment for her complicity in the schoolteacher's evil.

But Park never implies that by serving as a vengeance enabler for the other murdered children's parents, she's cleansing herself of sin; in fact, the movie is keenly aware that she might be expanding, or at least complicating, the original outrage. When the grieving parents find themselves in a warehouse, in which Mr. Baek is being held captive, and learn the truth about their missing offspring, they don plastic sheets, pick up carving implements and sit in a row of chairs outside the makeshift cell, as if waiting their turn at the butcher shop. But they're not all of one mind. Some are eager to exact revenge; some will themselves take part from a sense of religious or parental duty, or a feeling of grim solidarity with the other survivors; others try to get out of it because they fear legal consequences, or simply because deep down, they know vengeance would make them as evil as the schoolteacher. The sight of all these outwardly respectable, middle-class parents waiting for the chance to torture and kill a captive is not played as a cheap Sin City sight gag, but a darkly funny visualization of the absurdity and futility of vengeance. (It's like Luis Bunuel's Exterminating Angel by way of Death Wish.) By putting over-the-top movie violence in a funny, appalling, emotionally real context, Park makes us think about our thirst for bloodshed, real and represented, and the animalistic nature that thirst implies. And by cutting, after the movie's finale, to a wide shot of the parents taken from what seems to be a hundred feet in the air, Park puts their urges in context, viewing them as God might—as tiny, nasty insects.

As John Wayne was to the Old West cavalry officer, Julianne Moore is to the 1950s housewife: an icon with a human face. In Safe, Far from Heaven and The Hours, her performances were richer (or at least less oppressively schematic) than the material seemed designed to allow; whenever possible, she tried to show us the woman behind the symbol. But she's stymied by The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, about a mid-century housewife who supports ten children and an alcoholic husband (Woody Harrelson) by composing advertising jingles for write-in contests. (One goes, "Kraft Parkay won't tear fresh bread/Even cold, it will smoothly spread.") As adapted by playwright and filmmaker Jane Anderson (Baby Dance), it feels like a Todd Haynes movie made for Lifetime—nine parts dazzling period design and reductive sociology and one part drama. The slightly cutesy scenes of Evelyn knowingly summarizing the facts of her life while looking right into the camera, coupled with clever but kitschy transitions and lounge music cues, give us permission to view the past through the prism of our enlightened present, and grace a long-gone era with our pity.

Moore's Evelyn Ryan is a household saint, sweetly enduring the self-pity and violent temper tantrums of her husband Kelly, an embittered former singer whose music career ended prematurely. Evelyn's success as lyric wizard brings income and prizes into the home, making Kelly feel increasingly un-manly. Although he controls the household coffers, his wife increasingly fills them. (In an effectively theatrical touch, Evelyn wins a roomy freezer unit, and Kelly is so threatened by the prospect of filling it with meat that he tries to destroy it with a hammer.)

The Evelyn-Kelly marriage is this fairly placid movie's raging center, and to Anderson and Harrelson's credit, Kelly is generally depicted as more pitiful than monstrous. But Anderson (or perhaps the original book's author, Terry Ryan, who was writing about her mom) keeps trying to hammer Evelyn into little sociological gopher holes—pre-feminist martyr, tool of patriarchal oppression—and rather than fit right in, they impact on the film's glossy surface and flatten out. When Kelly drunkenly destroys a milk delivery, and Evelyn falls in it, the broken glass cuts stigmata into her palms, and the blood mixes with the milk. A priest makes light of Evelyn's concern over her husband's drinking by telling her "I'm sure he's carrying around the weight of the world," and after he leaves, one of Evelyn's children remarks, "His breath smells just like Dad's."