Synopsis: Pity poor Ryu. He's lost his job. His sister needs a kidney transplant. And he's been cheated of his savings AND one of his kidneys by a black market organ donation scam. When a kidney for his sister suddenly becomes available, he no longer has the money to foot the bill for the operation. His girlfriend has an idea: kidnap the daughter of Mr. Park, Ryu's former boss and use the ransom to save Ryu's sister. It doesn't hurt that his girlfriend is a communist agitator and kidnapping the daughter of a wealthy industrialist is a form of class warfare. Besides, who'll get hurt? Unfortunately, it all goes very, very wrong and LOTS of people get very, very hurt. Soon, Ryu and Mr. Park are locked into a collision course of mutual vengeance.
Hurt: Few movies deliver pain to an audience like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. To state the obvious, this is a violent movie, though if being "merely" violent were enough to put the hurt down on the viewer, a lot of other movies would hurt as much as or more than this one. That isn't the case. There are movies that spill blood in copious amounts that don't find the same kinds of pressure points that director Chanwook Park seems able to find without even trying very hard. Context, as they say, is everything. The dominant words in the title of this film are "Sympathy" and "Vengeance," and for once there is a balance struck. Sympathy feeds vengeance while this movie unfolds, and vice versa. This is the key to the bruising hurt the movie delivers. We feel it because we feel the characters feel it. Even aestheticized as the violence is here, it has meaning.
And make no mistake, the violence in this movie is aestheticized for all it's worth. Not, as one might expect, with a pallette of slow-motion or freeze-frames, a la John Woo or Sam Peckinpah. Instead, Park has composed each and every frame of the film to drug the eye. There is an overhead shot in this movie as one character drags a bleeding man through a shallow stream, billowing blood from the wounds, that is as beautiful as it is cruel. The whole movie is beautiful, after a fashion, which in itself is as troubling as the violence it depicts.
Politics: Although some critics disagree, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance doesn't seem like it employs its violence with mere sadism as its intent. That proposition paints Chan Wook-Park as some kind of Asian David Fincher. Contrary to this worldview is the humanism that peeks out from behind the brutality, and here, some allowances have to be made for the geo-political surroundings of the filmmakers. Korea, after all, is still engaged in a civil war, one that has raged as a "cold" war for fifty years now. The simmering resentments of that war color the events in a number of recent Korean films, not least of which is Park's previous film, Joint Security Area. The concerns of that film, in which the guards on both sides of the border try to be friends in spite of the politics of their governments, spill into this one. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance tips its allegorical hand all over the place. Ryu and his girlfriend are the "have nots," and lean towards communism; they engage in terrorist acts out of their desperation. Their antagonist is a wealthy capitalist who has tried to behave honorably even though his system inflicts economic casualties as a price of doing business. North and south? Oh yes. Place this against a mise en scene that often puts its characters on the opposite sides of vertical barriers and the meaning becomes inescapable. Beyond the political allegory, this film is as much the product of the Asian financial crisis as it is an allegory to the Korean war. The trigger for many of the events of the film are financial, after all. In this regard, the film's most recognizable forebearer is Kurosawa's High and Low, which Sympathy resembles by turns.
For all its bloodshed, the film hangs on its performances, which are uniformly excellent. Song Kang-ho in particular is a stand-out as the industrialist, cementing his position as one of Korea's finest leading men (see also Memories of Murder). Chanwook Park himself has announced himself as one of Korea's most prominent filmmakers with this film and the other two films in his "Vengeance Trilogy" (the other two are Old Boy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, which explore the revenge impulse from very different angles). Old Boy is arguably more violent than this first film (I haven't seen the third film at this writing), but for all that film's nastiness, it seems less brutal than Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Sympathy is a powerful thing.
This film is available as part of Tartan's Asia Extreme label, as is Old Boy. The disc includes a preview of Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, as well as a commentary by the director and some behind the scenes clips.
12/10/05