Señora Venganza

Aged 19, Geum-ja Lee confesses as the woman who abducted and murdered the child Won-mo Park. At the time the tabloids cause a clamour against her but this dies down once she is inside and forgotten. She is reached out to inside and finds faith and redemption. However almost 14 years later she is released and decides she no longer has need for this and sets out to catch up with those she knew from inside her prison, all the while working up to her plan to take revenge on the man who robbed her of this chunk of her life.

Having surprised myself by how much I liked Oldboy, I decided to watch this film as a follow-up. For the majority of it, the story has enough to it to hold the interest easily; the actual core deed is not as interesting on its own as it is shorn of the mystery of Oldboy, however in theory this means it is more about the people and the emotional impact of the act and the vengeance more than the violence. I say in theory because I must be honest and say that I found it a lot less emotionally engaging than I would have liked. In some ways it is strong in this area but mostly it didn't have the heart that I thought it was trying to get to. The narrative is still enough to fill the running time but the second half is, dare I say it, a bit duller than it should have been just because the humanity wasn't there.

Park must shoulder some responsibility for this but he does make up for it with the style and delivery that drew me into Oldboy. He has scaled it back from that (hence the feeling that this was meant to be more about the heart) but it is still visually engaging and uses various techniques to enhance the delivery. Yeong-ae Lee appears to have been given more insight into the material than I was because her delivery is full of emotion and hurt. She brings it out whenever she can but for some reason the film generally doesn't support her in this. The support cast are mostly good but the film belongs to her and is best when the scenes centre on either her story or her character.

Overall though, not as good as the praise and ratings here would suggest but still an engaging film on several levels. Stylish and interesting it only stuttered by being surprisingly emotionally muted for large chunks where I felt it needed to be more convincing and impacting. Fans of the other Park films will enjoy it as a conclusion to the trilogy but it is hard not to feel that it could have done more.

Just got the Korean 2 DVD set and watched the B/W version first. All I can say is that, this film is a masterpiece! I was very moved and if you do one more thing in your life before you die, see this film!

Of course, I use the term "masterpiece" in its true sense, as the work which reveals an artist's achievement of "mastery" over his or her craft. Don't be confused with the latter conotation that a masterpiece is a "perfect" work. Could there ever be such a thing? Truly, this film shows the original sense of the word, such that I would be nervous seeing any subsequent films from him.

There are two versions of the film. I checked the colour version, and besides the opening credits being slightly different, and the much talked about retaining of colour throughout, it appears to be exactly the same.

I am sure your are all familiar with the premise, but I think that the less you know, the better. At it's basic level, this film follows in the classic "quest for revenge" schema. A beautiful woman is condemned to 13 and a half years of incarceration for the kidnapping and murder of a young boy. By this theme, the film connects to the previous entries in the now Vengeance "Trilogy", but it is in no way a rerun.

Just like the other two films, (Sympathy for) Lady Vengeance is gorgeous. The design in the film is extraordinary, and there are so many frames that are simply beautiful. The use of colour and light is inspirational in some parts, and I really can't think of watching any version but the "fading" one. Maybe it's because I saw that version first, but I didn't find the colour version as deeply affecting.

I think that which is better will be a personal decision for all who see this film. There are a some points where the fading version is very effective with what becomes subdued spots of colour. Yet, the characters in the film are also colourful, and fleshed out enough so that the viewer gets to know them, but not enough that they know them completely.

The past is something hidden for these characters, in many ways that is a thematic point of the film. The film is truly about redemption, and as we follow the moving drama within we may even come to understand something within ourselves. It is truly a fitting end to this three film exploration into hate remorse and revenge.

"Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" is a surprisingly poetic finale to Park's excellent Revenge Trilogy. The film fuses the relatively low-key style of "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" with the jet-black humor of "Oldboy," while adding welcome moments of poignancy and sentiment. The film is nowhere near as violent as its predecessors, although a good deal of mayhem takes place offscreen.

Yeong-ae Lee is outstanding as the troubled protagonist Geum-ja, the ex-convict who is seeking redemption as much as revenge. Although the supporting actors -- including several from Park's earlier films -- are uniformly fine, Lee's performance is the heart of the film.

"Lady Vengeance" is difficult to describe without revealing major plot points, as the most memorable scenes come at revelatory moments in the story. Suffice it to say that the climax blends tragedy and hilarity with a degree of success that few directors could hope to match.

9/10. Bravo.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, in this case some 17 years old, as Geum-ja Lee plots, ways that Mr. Baek rots, it's a beautiful thing to behold.

Cinematic poetry in motion, a sensual blast of emotion, such fortitude and drive, such cunning to contrive, the passion, the focus, intense devotion (can also be said of Woo-jin Lee in Old Boy).

I guess it was somewhat convenient and clever for Park to have conceived this film as the third and final installment to his two pragmatically different films. Seeing as how Lady Vengeance shares two similar themes of unjust imprisonment and child kidnapping with her elder brothers Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Clearly if this picture wouldn't have been regarded in the trilogy, many would proclaim Park as stagnant and unable of moving away from these akin proses dealing with revenge.

Film opens with the release of Lady Vengeance, a.k.a. "The Witch", a.k.a. "kind-hearted Geum-ja", played by the elegant Yeong-ae Lee. I was quite surprised by how heavily narrated this film was from the get-go, as I was expecting the major breakdowns and motives revealed at a much later time, lets say right before the final pinnacle. But I preferred this to how Oldboy played, in a sense that Lady Vengeance didn't largely depended on the "big shocker" to end the film and instead moved along steadily, revealing everything piece by piece.

Making comparisons with Park's past two films was much tangible here as with each beautiful classical piece mirroring one from Oldboy there was also the unexaggerated violence similar to that of SFMV. The music was again well chosen and played in melancholic and elating waves without any use of mainstream ballads or electronic beats. Some of the compositions were used multiple times and while they might come off a bit repetitive, most of them were either recurring for the sake of certain notions and themes that the characters were going through or just because.

Aside from the tight main cast, many known and capable faces of Korean cinema made appearances in short and shorter interludes throughout the film. Not much else could be said, apart from them doing just as much as the script was asking of them. While the visual and musical aspects of the film are simply splendid, the story here might cause some viewers to contend whether everything premeditated and executed by our leading lady was truly worthful.

**The following comments contain spoilers**

A lot was shown of what Geum-ja was like during the prison time where she was boldly portrayed as a calculating, 'devil in God's clothes' of a woman who had a conveniently good eye for helping those who could later help her. Geum-ja was able to put on a quite a good by finding faith and making public speeches. But she had the best part reserved for Mr. Baek, played by the powerhouse actor Min-sik Choi. Mr. Baek had betrayed Geum-ja and made her take the blame for a murder of a child that he himself committed. And if then 19 year old Geum-ja was to refuse, he would've simply killed her (illegitimate) newborn child.

More was revealed about Mr. Baek who continued working as a kindergarten teacher for when Geum-ja captured him with the help of her former cell mate, who returned her a favor by marrying Mr. Baek and coping with his demeaning ways. Apparently Mr. Baek's past crime with that child wasn't a singular case as he had a fetish for capturing little kids and taping their deaths on camera for his viewing pleasure.

After toying with Mr. Baek, but holding back from completely destroying him, Geum-ja revealed her grand plan. Standing in the middle of an abandoned school, in a classroom of irregularly filled seats, Geum-ja gathered the family members of those kids that Mr. Baek had killed. After screening the tapes, Geum-ja gave those people options to either have their way with Baek or call upon the law to deal with him instead.

Watching these characters nauseate over the tapes of their little children being tortured in a way deflated Geum-ja's arc as a character and somewhat weakened the film's final punch in my eyes. So many years spent in jail and questions surrounding the well-being of her daughter must have been undoubtedly excruciating for her, but standing next to these people, who unlike her seemed so much more humane and relatable, I felt a lot more sorrow for them than I did for Geum-ja, most likely due to how mechanical and manipulative her character was made to look, which to say the least was brave of the director, if not a bit overzealous. Her struggles with gaining forgiveness from the dead boy and the symbolism of the white cake representing her state of repentance, overshadowed the climax of the revenge, however the scenes with the family members going in one by one after Mr. Baek were the essence of the film.

**End of spoilers**

In the end I found Lady Vengeance more infatuated with itself than Oldboy, but not as fundamentally visceral and unrelenting as SFMV, which remains to be my favorite film from Park to date. Lady Vengeance felt like an amusement park, filled with hard facts mixed with dreamy imagination sequences, en route of sardonic pokes at religion and sexual deeds. A film with a little bit of everything for everyone, that's if you don't strip away its flashy overtones and comic-book-like personifications, which gracefully coat the film's otherwise improbable scheme, fantasized by a random cell-woman, unjustly imprisoned for a crime she didn't commit.

I think Park needs to make a film that will not only disassociate him from his well talked about and highly debated trilogy flicks, but will devoid him from being thrown into the pool of devaluing comparisons to Hollywood films like Kill Bill as also witnessed with the response to A Bittersweet Life from the press and movie fans. Park has all the right tools and he has shown us the many faces of revenge, now it's time for him to show us something else.