Available on DVD since: November 22, 2005
Chan Wook Park’s first film of his so-called Vengeance Trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, is not the average revenge story, but rather it is a story about consequences, about the tragic missteps people can make when confronted to important situations. This is not to say that Park has taken a moral stance, or tries to push a message in the audience’s faces. Rather he has constructed with this film a story that does not look away from ugliness, even using an eye that magnifies brutality; all of this is achieved by a filmmaker with much confidence in pacing, visual composition, and storytelling.
The film very quickly sets up the mechanisms for the ensuing story’s conflict. Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin) is a deaf young man who works at a foundry and has been taking care of his sister, who is suffering from kidney failure. The doctor tells him that donors are very difficult to find, and there may be no hope for Ryu’s sister. Though Ryu is deaf, we understand very easily the trauma that this is causing him. The film begins with scenes of Ryu and his sister playing at a river when they were children, and a radio broadcast reading a letter from Ryu to his sister, promising her that there will be hope for her.
The mastery in how these first scenes are setup is truly impressive. From the beginning of the film, Chan Wook Park is juxtaposing the hideous with the beautiful, the painful with the pleasing. The scenes in the foundry are composed so delightfully, whereupon the geometry of machinery in the factory and the contrasting colors of hot liquid metal within dark, aged containers, the new emerging from the nurturing old, all screamed at me in their gracefulness. How interesting these images may be, to Ryu they are simply part of a monotonous reality over which he has little control.
Soon, Ryu begins to pay attention to stickers posted on walls, advertising a phone number to call for black-market organs. Ryu contacts these people, and he realizes that though it will be a costly deal, perhaps this way he will get results. Naturally, the deal does not work out as Ryu had expected, and after being berated by his intelligent girlfriend Yoong-mi (Bae Du-na) for being so gullible, the mechanisms of the story continue to turn. In need of a large sum of money in very little time, the couple undertakes to kidnap a wealthy businessman’s daughter in order to demand a ransom.
I am so wary of giving away parts of the plot that I will stop here, because Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance can be regarded in some sense as presenting an archetypal portrayal of a crime/revenge story, but this is not the important aspect. What Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance does is to take the essence of this type of story and twist it, hold it down, and while you can’t see the struggle, you can feel it in the film’s quiet moments, the tension is overwhelming. And then the tearing apart begins, where the archetype is exposed and magnified, and some truly brutal acts of violence are shown. The most frightening aspect of this revenge story is that the violence, though brutal and extreme, seems quite possible.
The story has a poetic quality to it, and though this aspect may seem obvious to some people, if it’s given the chance, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance can appeal to many. Chan Wook Park’s pacing and shot compositions in this film reminded me very much of some Stanley Kubrick films, mainly I am thinking of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut. In this respect, the film may be too slow for some people.
The actors all did a splendid job, but to me the star was Song Kang-ho, who played Dong-jin Park, the wealthy businessman whose daughter is kidnapped, and with special mention to Bae Du-na for adding a nice amount of life and charm to this film. It was hard to really judge Ha-kyun Shin’s performance as Ryu, but this is perhaps because he did such a good job in his role. Certainly, the role of a deaf man who is weary of life is not a performance that could showcase the obvious acting tricks, but he fills it with enough nuances that in fact, his performance was excellent as well!
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is not an easy film to watch: it has moments of sorrow, absurdity, brutality, and even some sad sweetness and sweet sadness! And this is for Leather Lass: there are vast amounts of punishment happening in this film. For you, and only you, I can suggest this film as being a possible “date” movie. ;-)
With hints of social commentary to do with socialism, capitalism, black-market trade, the main lesson here is straightforward, and a little bit Newtonian: every immoral action will yield an immoral reaction of the same, but possibly higher order. It is a cold message, but it is not one that is forced into our minds. To me, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance was not about saying anything in particular, but rather about how to show it, and in this respect it is a success.
