THE BLISTERING BRILLIANCE
OF SYMPATHY FOR MR VENGEANCE
OF SYMPATHY FOR MR VENGEANCE
What the hell’s wrong with you Asians, anyhow? For about ten or
eleven minutes I was thinking you were a pretty sound bunch of
individuals, and that, most likely, that Takashi Miike son of a
bitch was just some disastrous, psychotic blip in an otherwise
blipless terrain, like, I dunno, Down In The Groove by Bob Dylan.
You folks are going the right away about convincing The Duke
that maybe y’all are just as demented as the fella what made
Ichi The Killer. I’m guessing there’s a collective insanity at
work, like what blighted those Wisconsin types in the Death Trip
film, except instead of running around breaking windows and
stuff, you folks are making the stunningly original and
bafflingly brilliant examples of extreme cinema.
I mean really, Asians, if you’re not sawing a poor bugger’s feet
off with piano wire, then you’re tossing glass bottles at Bill
Murray when he’s just trying to have a nice time and maybe get a
sex from Scarlet Johansson.
But, Asians, The Duke is going to allow this anti-social
malarkey to continue unpunished, providing you, in turn,
continue to produce the best motherfucking flicks in the
universe. For as long as the Hana Bi’s and the Ju-On’s and the
Visitor Q’s and so on continue to pour fourth, I’ll turn a blind
eye to the psychopathic eccentricities.
So long as there are products as amazing as Chon Wook-Park’s
Sympathy For Mr Vengeance. So long as you continue to convince
The Duke that exhilarating, inventive, unpredictable cinema is
still something to be expected of an evening.
2002’s Sympathy…, or Boksuneun naui geot, was only Wook-Park’s
second feature. As sophomore efforts go, it’s up there with the
likes of Pulp Fiction, or The Usual Suspects, a film so
confident, so sure of itself, that you’d imagine it to be the
work of a 60 year old veteran. But no, it’s not, and you’d be an
ignorant fool to assume so.
The real beauty of Sympathy For Mr Vengeance lies in its sheer
unpredictability, it’s refusal to follow any conventional
notions of how a story should progress. As a result, though, it
would be a crime fit to rank alongside plundering a pensioner’s
pockets for drug money, if The Duke were to breathe more than a
semi-coherent whisper regarding the plot.
What transpires is that a fella who is afflicted with being deaf
and mute, attempts to find a suitable organ donor for his
terminally-ill sister, that she might be granted a life-saving
operation.
Unable to find much assistance of any substantial nature via the
legal means, he instead opts to fling a load of the cash at some
shady black-market organ dealer types. Of course, no sooner has
he returned from this bout of the hush-hush dealings, than he
discovers that a proper, legal donor is now available, providing
he has the money to pay for it all.
Unfortunately, on account of this bunch a motherfuckers what, it
emerges, would rather get high on The Heroin than find him a
suitable kidney, he ain’t got a penny left in the whole wide
world.
Oh, they also relieved him of his own kidney, by way of a trade
or something.
From this already rather complicated series of events is borne
an unbelievably tragic plunge towards spiralling despair.
Decisions are made with little or no thorough consideration, and
these fairly off-the-cuff impulses go on to set in motion
disaster after disaster after disaster.
I will say not one further consonant with regards the plot,
suffice to hint that if you thought a film wouldn’t go so far as
to show a fella get his ankles slit to blazes with a knife, or
have a shot of a cremation-in-progress from inside the coffin,
then you hadn’t bargained on the fact that Sympathy For Mr
Vengeance will never be content so long as you are.
But don’t be getting all high-and-mighty and assuming this is
some kind of grubby, exploitation gore-fest. It most certainly
is not. What is in, in fact, is a study of revenge, a study of
the consequences of seemingly insignificant actions, and how
they can go on to produce cataclysmic effects.
In this sense, it’s like that story about if a butterfly flaps
its wings in Africa then will a tree fall if there’s no sound?
Something like that. This isn’t a motherfucking philosophy
lecture.
The point is, you’d be hard-pressed to find a flick what manages
to invoke such heartbreaking empathy, whilst simultaneously
administering such exhilarating tension.
It’s also very funny indeed, something what makes the grim
inevitability of the shenanigans much easier to accept. One
moment early on has a group of four adolescent males engaging in
a frantic circle-jerk on account of the folks having mad, very
noisy sexings next door. As they push their ears to the walls
that they might catch every orgasmic groan, we are taken through
the concrete partition, like Patrick Swayze could do in the film
where Whoopi Goldberg was funny, and we discover that the sounds
are not, in fact, being made by a couple involved in the old in-
out, but are actually being made by the aforementioned sibling,
screaming in agony on account of the dodgy kidney.
This kind of two-fingered salute to the old expectations and
what not carries on throughout the two hours of intensive, Noir-
influenced genre-hopping. It is at once a detective flick, a
crime picture, a comedic romp and a deeply unsettling horror
film. That it emerges so cohesive and all-encompassing is rather
miraculous in itself. It’s like if you ran through your kitchen
throwing even ingredient what came to hand into a big pot, and
then you found out later on that you’d accidentally made a
perfect apple pie.
Personally, that would suck for The Duke. I don’t like apple pie.
But we’re not here to discuss metaphors or motherfucking
similes, so don’t get lippy, man, is what.
And let’s digress for a second for to talk about the “sound”.
You didn’t think for a second that a film with a fella eating a
lump of guts freshly torn from some poor motherfucker just when
he was about to sex with a corpse, you didn’t think there’d be
any room for to yack about the “sound-design”, not with all the
filth and the degradation.
But think twice, like Celine Dion implored a few years ago,
except I don’t think she was discussing the Korean cinema at the
time. Probably something to do with love or boats, or whatever
the hell Celine Dion worries about these days.
The soundtrack is amazing, incorporating a whole barrage of
gimmicks and ambient atmospherics. It runs the gamut from
squealing, free-form jazz dementia to painfully amplified
weeping or, sometimes, nothing at all, on account of we’re
hearing what our deaf protagonist would be hearing. The sound of
air fleeting through a fella’s lungs.
The fact that our protagonist is deaf also serves to provide a
couple moments of seriously white-knuckle tension. You may
recall at the end of Copland, when, I believe, Arnold
Schwarzenegger went deaf for a moment, and it was all very
impressive. Well, prepare to forget all about that film with the
Keitel and the De Niro, because Sympathy For Mr Vengeance
utilises the condition, a condition unthinkable to anyone
blessed with functional hearing facilities, and makes it a truly
integral element of the plot, instead of just a nice way for to
end a film about the “corruption” with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Although, having said that, there’s also room for a discussion
or two regarding the “corruption” in this, too. Mostly, it
focuses on political corruption, big-business and all that. In
fact, economic insecurity is pretty much the catalyst for every
deranged action.
If only they had a non-privatised Health Service, man. Folks
wouldn’t need to be getting their ears burned with electrical
torture devices.
I can’t recommend this flick enough, is what, and in the next
couple days I’m gonna get a chance to sit down with Wook-Park’s
latest bout of criminal hi-jinks, Old Boy.
The Duke, as is his eternal affliction, cannot motherfucking
wait.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line
eleven minutes I was thinking you were a pretty sound bunch of
individuals, and that, most likely, that Takashi Miike son of a
bitch was just some disastrous, psychotic blip in an otherwise
blipless terrain, like, I dunno, Down In The Groove by Bob Dylan.
You folks are going the right away about convincing The Duke
that maybe y’all are just as demented as the fella what made
Ichi The Killer. I’m guessing there’s a collective insanity at
work, like what blighted those Wisconsin types in the Death Trip
film, except instead of running around breaking windows and
stuff, you folks are making the stunningly original and
bafflingly brilliant examples of extreme cinema.
I mean really, Asians, if you’re not sawing a poor bugger’s feet
off with piano wire, then you’re tossing glass bottles at Bill
Murray when he’s just trying to have a nice time and maybe get a
sex from Scarlet Johansson.
But, Asians, The Duke is going to allow this anti-social
malarkey to continue unpunished, providing you, in turn,
continue to produce the best motherfucking flicks in the
universe. For as long as the Hana Bi’s and the Ju-On’s and the
Visitor Q’s and so on continue to pour fourth, I’ll turn a blind
eye to the psychopathic eccentricities.
So long as there are products as amazing as Chon Wook-Park’s
Sympathy For Mr Vengeance. So long as you continue to convince
The Duke that exhilarating, inventive, unpredictable cinema is
still something to be expected of an evening.
2002’s Sympathy…, or Boksuneun naui geot, was only Wook-Park’s
second feature. As sophomore efforts go, it’s up there with the
likes of Pulp Fiction, or The Usual Suspects, a film so
confident, so sure of itself, that you’d imagine it to be the
work of a 60 year old veteran. But no, it’s not, and you’d be an
ignorant fool to assume so.
The real beauty of Sympathy For Mr Vengeance lies in its sheer
unpredictability, it’s refusal to follow any conventional
notions of how a story should progress. As a result, though, it
would be a crime fit to rank alongside plundering a pensioner’s
pockets for drug money, if The Duke were to breathe more than a
semi-coherent whisper regarding the plot.
What transpires is that a fella who is afflicted with being deaf
and mute, attempts to find a suitable organ donor for his
terminally-ill sister, that she might be granted a life-saving
operation.
Unable to find much assistance of any substantial nature via the
legal means, he instead opts to fling a load of the cash at some
shady black-market organ dealer types. Of course, no sooner has
he returned from this bout of the hush-hush dealings, than he
discovers that a proper, legal donor is now available, providing
he has the money to pay for it all.
Unfortunately, on account of this bunch a motherfuckers what, it
emerges, would rather get high on The Heroin than find him a
suitable kidney, he ain’t got a penny left in the whole wide
world.
Oh, they also relieved him of his own kidney, by way of a trade
or something.
From this already rather complicated series of events is borne
an unbelievably tragic plunge towards spiralling despair.
Decisions are made with little or no thorough consideration, and
these fairly off-the-cuff impulses go on to set in motion
disaster after disaster after disaster.
I will say not one further consonant with regards the plot,
suffice to hint that if you thought a film wouldn’t go so far as
to show a fella get his ankles slit to blazes with a knife, or
have a shot of a cremation-in-progress from inside the coffin,
then you hadn’t bargained on the fact that Sympathy For Mr
Vengeance will never be content so long as you are.
But don’t be getting all high-and-mighty and assuming this is
some kind of grubby, exploitation gore-fest. It most certainly
is not. What is in, in fact, is a study of revenge, a study of
the consequences of seemingly insignificant actions, and how
they can go on to produce cataclysmic effects.
In this sense, it’s like that story about if a butterfly flaps
its wings in Africa then will a tree fall if there’s no sound?
Something like that. This isn’t a motherfucking philosophy
lecture.
The point is, you’d be hard-pressed to find a flick what manages
to invoke such heartbreaking empathy, whilst simultaneously
administering such exhilarating tension.
It’s also very funny indeed, something what makes the grim
inevitability of the shenanigans much easier to accept. One
moment early on has a group of four adolescent males engaging in
a frantic circle-jerk on account of the folks having mad, very
noisy sexings next door. As they push their ears to the walls
that they might catch every orgasmic groan, we are taken through
the concrete partition, like Patrick Swayze could do in the film
where Whoopi Goldberg was funny, and we discover that the sounds
are not, in fact, being made by a couple involved in the old in-
out, but are actually being made by the aforementioned sibling,
screaming in agony on account of the dodgy kidney.
This kind of two-fingered salute to the old expectations and
what not carries on throughout the two hours of intensive, Noir-
influenced genre-hopping. It is at once a detective flick, a
crime picture, a comedic romp and a deeply unsettling horror
film. That it emerges so cohesive and all-encompassing is rather
miraculous in itself. It’s like if you ran through your kitchen
throwing even ingredient what came to hand into a big pot, and
then you found out later on that you’d accidentally made a
perfect apple pie.
Personally, that would suck for The Duke. I don’t like apple pie.
But we’re not here to discuss metaphors or motherfucking
similes, so don’t get lippy, man, is what.
And let’s digress for a second for to talk about the “sound”.
You didn’t think for a second that a film with a fella eating a
lump of guts freshly torn from some poor motherfucker just when
he was about to sex with a corpse, you didn’t think there’d be
any room for to yack about the “sound-design”, not with all the
filth and the degradation.
But think twice, like Celine Dion implored a few years ago,
except I don’t think she was discussing the Korean cinema at the
time. Probably something to do with love or boats, or whatever
the hell Celine Dion worries about these days.
The soundtrack is amazing, incorporating a whole barrage of
gimmicks and ambient atmospherics. It runs the gamut from
squealing, free-form jazz dementia to painfully amplified
weeping or, sometimes, nothing at all, on account of we’re
hearing what our deaf protagonist would be hearing. The sound of
air fleeting through a fella’s lungs.
The fact that our protagonist is deaf also serves to provide a
couple moments of seriously white-knuckle tension. You may
recall at the end of Copland, when, I believe, Arnold
Schwarzenegger went deaf for a moment, and it was all very
impressive. Well, prepare to forget all about that film with the
Keitel and the De Niro, because Sympathy For Mr Vengeance
utilises the condition, a condition unthinkable to anyone
blessed with functional hearing facilities, and makes it a truly
integral element of the plot, instead of just a nice way for to
end a film about the “corruption” with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Although, having said that, there’s also room for a discussion
or two regarding the “corruption” in this, too. Mostly, it
focuses on political corruption, big-business and all that. In
fact, economic insecurity is pretty much the catalyst for every
deranged action.
If only they had a non-privatised Health Service, man. Folks
wouldn’t need to be getting their ears burned with electrical
torture devices.
I can’t recommend this flick enough, is what, and in the next
couple days I’m gonna get a chance to sit down with Wook-Park’s
latest bout of criminal hi-jinks, Old Boy.
The Duke, as is his eternal affliction, cannot motherfucking
wait.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line
