Sympathy for Mr Vengeance

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance [MV] was the first of three films in the "Vengeance Trilogy" from South Korean director Chan-wook Park. His fifth feature, it appeared in 2002. Old Boy [OB] followed the next year, and Lady Vengeance [LV] in 2005.

Park is a unique talent, and it's indicative that the only special feature on the DVD of MV is a sequence of story board sketches outlining the highlights of the ultra-violent movie.

In the movie, even in the goriest most shocking incidents, the aesthetics of the storyboarding are clear, in Park's meticulous composition of each scene's colour balance, lighting effects, off-screen sound effects and actors' ensemble poses. Early in MV, in the steel factory where Ryu (charismatic Ha-kyun Shin) the deaf-and-dumb anti-hero works, splashes and lines of green decorate the set. They were designed to complement Ryu's green hair dye.

The whole film is so artfully self-conscious, one knows that the seemingly chaotic jump cuts in the storyline must also be deliberate. Frequently, the audience is forced - deliberately alienated, I'd guess - into seeing a character or a plot development as both inexplicable and unrealistic.

If Park's quartet of screenwriters, including himself, were creating social melodramas, an audience might sneer at such cinematic conceits. When the scenario bristles with deep black humour and shocking moments of gore and sadism, a viewer is forced to drop his jaw and gape in disbelief. Park is Hitchcock on a much higher, riper level, at times almost sickening, always engrossing.

Can a mass masturbation scene be a comedic triumph? Has anyone ever used bottles of urine to mark the passage of time? Can the ghost of a kidnapped girl be shown to make her grieving father (another bewitching Park regular, Kang-ho Song) laugh? Can we wait ten minutes to guess why the anti-hero has a gash in his stomach?

The basic story is simple. The deaf-dumb man and his revolutionary-anarchist girlfriend kidnap a rich man's daughter to raise money for an organ transplant for the man's sister. A mentally retarded stranger, akin to Lear's Fool, stumbles by and the girl dies accidentally. From then on, revenge is rampant, blood seeps and teems, and the framing of each scene remains mesmerising evidence of a very disturbed cinematic genius.

Genius, yes, because there are few movies that compel a viewer to seek out their sequels, fewer that demand replays in order to see the creative methods in the seeming madness.