The snow is falling, and blood is leaking from an old man who barely croaks to his assassin: “Why?”
“Revenge,” says the titular killer of “Lady Snowblood.” Simple as that.
Oldboys out for blood, misters and ladies seeking justice — you can dress up a motivation or, like Lady Snowblood, call it what it is: capital-r Revenge.
The titles from this month all center around blood-soaked retribution: Three of the selections make up the Vengeance Trilogy from Park Chan-wook, the South Korean master who has never received an Oscar nomination, including for his recent marvel, “No Other Choice.” Watch them in spite of the Academy’s apparent myopia.
1. ‘Lady Snowblood’ (1973)
Has vengeance ever been so ecstatically gruesome, so drenched in showers of blood as it is in Toshiya Fujita’s “Lady Snowblood”?
The elegantly graphic violence provides the immediate schlocky pleasures here. Lady Snowblood (Meiko Kaji), born with a mandate to avenge her family members who were killed by a thieving gang, spends a lifetime obsessed with enacting a fated reprisal.
But the thrills of all that slicing and dicing are really second to the film’s modern and kinetic compositions. (Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” heavily cribs its stylistic and tonal swagger.) It’s all alive, even when there is no blood being spilled.
2. ‘Revenge’ (2017)
You can’t help but squirm during the first stretch of Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature. Much of it is spent ogling the body of the lollipop-sucking blondie Jen (Matilda Lutz) as she skitters around a desert getaway with her boyfriend, before things turn sour and she’s assaulted and left for dead.
Even knowing that Fargeat is here to send up the rape-revenge genre, and that Jen will soon execute a grisly clap-back of retribution, we are still indulging in its sleazier tendencies. Indeed, there’s a question of whether the genre’s format is rotten at the core, no matter the subversion.
But then the film gets kicked into high gear, with Jen in the driver’s seat, and suddenly those reservations are obliterated into a pool of blood and guts (a precursor to Fargeat’s next film, 2024’s “The Substance”). It’s hard not to give into the pulpy rush when the camera swoops around Jen after she has been resurrected: Her hair is no longer blonde, but matted in mud, and suddenly her body has been transformed into that of a warrior branded in fire. That parody of lollipop fantasy has re-emerged as a Furiosa powered on desert peyote.
3. ‘Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance’ (2002)
Watch it on Tubi or Plex.
You can trace so much of what animates Park’s recent stunner, “No Other Choice,” in this early film: folks squeezed by economic desperation; the spiral of violence that they resort to; the shadow of America and global capitalism.
The first of the Vengeance Trilogy, “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” was a dud upon its release. But what was, perhaps, illegible then emerges, years later, as an early draft by a master who was just beginning to sharpen his tools.
It’s both a strikingly violent and quiet film, only partly as a reflection of the experience of its deaf protagonist (Shin Ha-kyun), who kidnaps the daughter of an executive (Song Kang-ho) and tries to extort money for his sister’s kidney transplant. But his scheme mostly sets off a string of accidental bloodshed. Park sees outrageous violence as the comic and tragic inevitability of a broken world.
As for that sense of quiet, Park is honing a sensibility of the purely cinematic: He’s never interested in explaining the story’s beats, but instead in translating them wholly through image and sound that arrest and surprise.
4. ‘Oldboy’ (2003)
This is a rare international breakthrough that reached America via provocations seemingly catered toward teenage boy cinephiles. But Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy” retains its cult status not just for its hallway fight scene, or the you-know-what, but the human tragedy beneath the bombast.
“Oldboy” follows a man who is abducted and imprisoned for 15 years in a motel room, only to be released and led down a byzantine, shocking mechanism of revenge. It’s easy to see how its plot devices thrust Park on the global stage — this is a loud film, motivated by a shameless indulgence in perversity. Above all, it is restlessly thrilling, a work in which Park’s inventive craftsmanship coalesced with the propulsive power of mass entertainment.
5. ‘Lady Vengeance’ (2005)
The final installment in Park’s Vengeance Trilogy is arguably the weakest, in part for its sometimes confusing first half. Tracking the protagonist Geum-ja’s plan to take revenge on a former partner-in-kidnapping, for whom she took the fall after 13 years in prison, is tricky. These portions can feel like digressions for Park to use as playgrounds for his sardonic style.
But it’s in the film’s second half that we see the trilogy at its most anguished — when revenge has become as violent as ever but leaves the clearest sense of how hollow the act ultimately is. You can (literally) fill up buckets of blood, but it’ll never bring anyone back.
- Credits: The New York Times
- Author: Brandon Yu
