La Flûte de roseau

From Kazakhstan, this is an adaptation of a novel by Anatoli Kim, a Soviet man of Korean descent. When a teacher murders one of his young students, the student's father vows revenge. He follows the teacher from Korea to Russia, but is unable to enact his revenge. He then begets a son to fulfill his legacy. The story itself isn't particularly interesting, though it's not bad, either. The film looks quite beautiful and has a couple of memorable sequences. This film was rediscovered as part of Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project, but didn't make the recent box set that Criterion released. There may be future installments of the series, but for now this can be watched on Hulu Plus.

Revenge was a Soviet film similar to Park Chan-Wok's film that follows the story of a Korean Man who wants revenge for his Sister who was raped and murdered. This movie is the finest of Soviet-Korean Cinema, and I love that it was excellent. I love this movie, because this movie shows the brutality of Humankind, and USSR films are better. This movie was created in the late 80s when the Soviet Union was Dying, and this movie is the finest of Soviet Cinema; we know that this movie is one of the My favorite Soviet films of the 1980s behind the iconic Come and See from 1985, the most excellent film of all time.

I wish that all films about revenge were as layered and poetic as this one. From the very beginning, in the prologue we the struggle between brutality and mercy, and throughout the film there is a tension between seeking revenge and forgiveness. There are elements of Christianity in the latter, such as the washing of feet of the healer woman and a monk's pledge to give her his own shoes in tale two, followed by his stopping an attempt at revenge with the imprecation "Man must not kill man." There are also elements of Taoism, such as the poet's desire to return to nothingness in the prologue, as well as strong Buddhist overtones in that fantastic conversation in the rain in tale four, which had these lines:

"Man is like a reed flute on which someone plays a melody. ... There is no truth to be found hidden in the word 'I'. ... We are two passing illusions, two dreams that no one will remember."

There are times when the thirst for revenge can simply end, such as when the father of the murdered child dies himself, but the film shows how hard this can be. Like the disease that is passed on to the son, so too, the cycle of vengeance propagates, despite the burden it represents to the living, and while the ghosts of the past look on. It's in the spiritual characters, those willing to do good work without payment or to atone for the sins of others, or in the promise of love, such as that offered by the Romanian woman in tale five, that counterbalance these destructive desires. How wonderful it was that the buildup to revenge over decades didn't lead to some grand Tarantino-esque butchery; ultimately the killer is destroyed by drinking which came out of fear (in turn spurred by his conscience), and the revenge fizzles out anticlimactically.

Be forewarned that despite its philosophical and visual beauty, there are a couple of instances of cruelty to animals in the film, the first a dog attacking an injured goose, and the second, a rat tormented by children, then doused with gasoline and set on fire (the latter of which may have been done with an effect, I can only hope).

The film ends with two elderly women talking about children and life while walking along the seashore at sunset, an enigmatic, lyrical scene that Andrei Tarkovsky would have been proud of. In it are these lines:

"Children are given to us to further entangle us in the nets of destiny." "No, it's so that love may flourish on earth."

Despite the cruelty of children in youth, despite them growing up to be cruel adults like the emperor, despite them learning of grudges and carrying them forward - despite all of those things - the purity of love between parent and child, the fresh slate of a baby's innocence, and the potential wellspring of good in each child represents our only hope, if only children can be educated by someone creative, wise, and forgiving.

Revenge is certainly a dedicated film, mostly in its first half or so (up till about part 5, yep this is in patts), where the dedication is to having extremely beautiful pictures to go with one of the more oblique dramas that has ever been made - or at least screened at Cannes and later got into Criteeion via Scorsese. Everything is not so much at a remove as it is meditative to the point of inertia. It's like the filmmakers set out to craft a work where the pulpy joys and exploitation-type of thrills associated with a revenge story are thrown off its axis for the sake of... poetry I suppose.

Maybe at least for the first half it was not a great idea to watch after a long day of work and a poor night of prior sleep; for all the sumptuous lighting and evocation of a spare, tragic but also By-Nature-it-Surrounds-and-binds-us visuals, it's easy to forget what a juicy premise is at the center: a foolish and seemingly diabolical man (who we won't get to know really through the course of the story- also by design) kills a young girl and the family swears revenge - or rather the father takes a mute and/or deaf woman to birth a son who will have one purpose which is to avenge his half sister. What kind of life is that for a person predetermined to be one way? Is it like a cult mentality or even like those communities where a man is told this is what one must be for all time in relation to the world?

The problem is Sungu, the boy who becomes a man set to only find this man Yan and avenge her for his father (there may or may not be the art house version of the scene from the Raimi Spiderman where Norman tells Harry to do just that) is not really allowed to be an active presence until halfway into the picture. Either the scenes with the father, his family, Yan and the community around them needed more fleshing out or something more emotionally speaking, or just condense the set up and get to it being about Sungu's journey.

I suppose I'm so critical because once it gets to part 5 and beyond, where we see Sunju on his journey (at one point he is tempted by a lonely Romanian woman and the end of this scene is truly disturbing in an effective way) and, after being visited by ghosts of dad and half-sis, comes to the area where he may finally find Yan... and what he comes to is bitterly ironic, how the director and writer come upon this fate and how revenge in its way unfolds is fascinating and weirdly gripping. And I was absorbed by and liked the last ten minutes where the poetic and philosophic merge together into this mournful but theatrical musing, about how the totality of life and death come together under that sun and by the ocean.

In other words, Revenge is uneven and frustrating, though maybe that's more of an MP than a YP. I can't entirely recommend it, and the Tarkovsky comparisons I've seen on here and elsewhere don't add up for me (he also takes his deliberative ass time but there's more psychically and spiritually I get from there than this gives for at least a while), but the moments it has are vivid and even horrific and jarring.

Soviet-Korean writer Anatoli Kim is unknown to me, but judging on the basis of this movie he seems like a 14 year old trying to write like Boris Pasternak. I hope I am wrong.

This movie about the Korean diaspora traces this revenge through a long historical span from the pre-Japanese colonization Chosen dynasty in Korea to the relative modern Korean diaspora in the 80's in Soviet-Union.

There's something about scale and budget, ambition shouldn't overreach capacities or resources. What tries to be epic end up being incomplete in every sense. Atop of that there's many sequences that doesn't actually serve much purpose.

Bonus points for bad acting and some inane poetry at the end! I will never forget those lines about the birds flying from the sun and not burning.