Vengeance Trilogy

Vengeance Trilogy

Hammer, tooth, and nail, South Korean director Park Chan-wook's emotionally devastating, morally tortuous, and deliriously designed "vengeance trilogy" is one of a precious handful of non-character-related cine-triptychs in film history that remains freshly, viscerally engaging even after multiple viewings. Like Sergio Leone's "Dollars" films, Park's feverish, upscaled genre mindbenders accrue a moral ambiguity regarding the whole notion of revenge – why a man (or woman) is driven (or cornered) into that dark, ultimately unsatisfying mindset, and, most importantly to Park, what the true cost of revenge is upon the person who willfully engages in it. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Park's 2002 breakthrough film (in the West, at least), initiated the director's overarching idea that, eventually, vengeance really can equate with purity. But that notion doesn't fully come into play until Lady Vengeance. This first film's sympathies lie in more traditional moral codes, along the lines of "an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind." Or, in this case, minus a kidney. Shin Ha-kyun is Ryu, a deaf-mute factory worker who, purely out of sibling love, becomes involved in a scheme to aid his sickly sister by kidnapping his boss' young daughter. The least slick – at times it's downright melodramatic, but in a refreshingly sick way – of the three, Sympathy paved the way for 2003's still-outrageous Oldboy, a formalist exercise in comedic self-destruction that hinges on the remarkable performance of Choi Min-sik as a sloppy salaryman imprisoned in a drab not-quite-a-motel room by persons unknown and then unpredictably released to go predictably apeshit. Oldboy is based on a manga and feels like it, episodic and epic in equal amounts, and Park's technique – the greeny-grainy nightmare color palette is so dreamlike as to be downright Fuselian – has noticeably evolved. His third, and thus far final, foray into the depths of vendetta despair is the stylistically airtight, ethically out-of-control, and sumptuously crafted Lady Vengeance. Lee Yeong-ae is the titular "kind-hearted" lady in question, who begins her convoluted (but believable) character arc by being imprisoned for a murder she did not commit and ends it by organizing an elaborate orgy of righteous vengeance against the true killer. Lady Vengeance is a fitting culmination to the trilogy; by film's end everyone is implicated in something too awful to abide and Park has evolved into one of the most astonishingly talented filmmakers alive. But, chances are, you already knew that if you're a fan, so why lay out $50 for Palisades' new box set? Apart from the fact that this eight-disc, remixed, remastered collection has all the bells and whistles you'd expect (eight separate audio commentaries, separate music-score tracks, nearly a dozen excellent and informative featurettes, and, oh my God, so much more), it also contains two "extras" that are every bit as remarkable as the films themselves. The first is the so-called "Fade to White" version of Lady Vengeance, a considerably different variant of the film in which all color is incrementally leached from the image until we reach the white light of either purity or death (or, possibly, probably, both). The second reason is the three-hour-long documentary The Autobiography of Oldboy, which is without question one of the best "making of" extras yet released on DVD. It's everything you'd ever want to know/see/hear/feel about Park's historical three-way, and it's better even than the Region 2 Korean box set. Vengeance is yours, sayeth Park Chan-wook. Take it and weep.