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LADY VENGEANCE
Directed by: Park Chanwook.
Produced by: Lee Tae-hun & Cho Young-wuk.
Written by: Chung Seo-kyung & Park Chanwook.
Director of Photography: Chung Chung-hoon.
Edited by: Kim Sang-bum & Kim Jae-bum.
Music by: Choi Seung-hyun.
Released by: Tartan.
Country of Origin: South Korea. 111 min. Rated: R.
With: Lee Young-ae & Choi Min-sik.

The last film in Park Chanwook’s Vengeance Trilogy opens with the bizarre tableau of six Korean Santa Clauses outside a women’s penitentiary singing about redemption. They are awaiting the release of Lee Geum-ja (played by the willowy Lee Young-ae), who, after confessing to kidnapping and smothering a small boy, has won the hearts of Korea with “her naiveté, her beauty and her primal ruthlessness.” It certainly helps that she has become a Christian celebrity in prison, delivering televised speeches about penance and sin. So it comes as a surprise to the Santas when the angelic Geum-ja comes over and throws tofu at them.

As in Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, revenge continues to transform Park’s otherwise innocuous characters. It quickly becomes apparent that Geum-ja only confessed to suffocating the boy out of love for his real killer, who, as it turns out, has killed more than just one boy. But Lady Vengeance spends only a fraction of its running-time on the stylish cat-and-mouse games that its predecessors reveled in. Instead, Park nurtures his Uma Thurman – and a multitude of minor characters as well – along the complicated, torturous path of self-healing.

The long-standing Asian legacy of “pinky violence” films (where a gorgeous and wrathful female hurricane takes on men and women alike) continues here with gratuitous shots of Geum-ja sitting in a chair, smoking a cigarette, and generally busying herself by looking pensively beautiful. After making a name as an ingénue by starring in works like One Fine Spring Day and A Jewel in the Palace, Lee Young-ae plays her role to the hilt, maintaining an enigmatic face but never coming across as the dead-eyed killing machine that lesser actresses could have portrayed. With Lee, we are always aware of the depth of emotion behind Geum-ja’s many necessary facades.

It’s easy to compare this film to Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill for a number of reasons, but Park does something here that Tarantino didn’t. For all of Bill’s referencing, it never turned the genre on its head like Lady Vengeance does. The film continues the cinematic fascination with angel/witch characters and Park goes to great lengths to show that both are facets of an innate dichotomy, evident most obviously in Geum-ja but in almost the entire cast of characters, in ways obvious and subtle.

Gratefully, Lady Vengeance doesn’t end with Geum-ja smiling, slinging her gun over her shoulder, and calling it a day, as most pink films tend to do. Instead, the ending is a fitting resolution to a stand-alone film and a tension-filled trilogy that connects the three movies and relieves its viewers from their investment of some six violent hours. Zachary Jones
April 28, 2006