Preliminary Review of Sympathy for Lady Vengeance

I'll have to admit that the reason why I watched this movie was not because I am a fan of Park Chan-wook's movies (I'm not sure if he is that great a director) nor because I had seen the other two movies in the Vengeance trilogy (I haven't), but because of Lee Young Ae. I skimmed through the movie while I was home in CA back in early June.








I thought I had read in a review somewhere about her refusing communion, but iirc there is no such scene in the movie. There is, however, a scene of her refusing to eat the cake she made for her daughter. Maybe it's just a visual representation of 'you can't eat your cake and have it too.' Certainly it is tied to the question of whether someone can pursue vengeance and still find redemption.

The visual styles and the way the story is told might be considered innovative; I didn't get lost though it did require a lot of attention. As for showing realistically how vicious life could be in a women's prison... that could always be toned down a bit.

Is Geum-ja an innocent angel? Or a witch? The movie flips back and forth between these two images. On the one hand, while she is innocent of the murder of the young boy to which she confesses, she does commit murder while she is in prison, in order to help her fellow prisoners escape from certain tyrants. Naive and innocent, cold and deadly... is it psychologically possible to have this sort of split? I would think not... unless one were to make the case that the murder was really self-defense, but it is not clear to me that killing the prison tyrant is the only solution.
(Unlike a later scene in the movie... where some measure of self-defense is required, but perhaps again, she goes too far... an exercise in extreme brutality, as it were.)

If it is motherhood that saves her, and her willingness to be apart from her daughter because she believes that is best (and also because she is undeserving to be a mother), what (or who)condemns her? I believe that at the end, the audience is left sympathetic to her character, but one is not sure how she can find peace. An unconscious appeal to a transcendent source of justice?

I suppose I'll have to re-watch the movie and see if I can make better sense of it.

movie posters (warning large files): 1, 2,
Korean website. Koreanfilm.org; review and gallery

wallpaper; old pic (almost looks fake?)

More pictures of Lee Young Ae:






Photos from the 2006 LG Pan Asian Family Festival:


More photos from that occasion.







(I think that's by Andre Kim.)