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Lady Vengeance
Park Chan-wook
Lady Vengeance
Introduction by Reel Asian Artistic Director Aram Siu Wai Collier on July 22
35mm Print!
The apotheosis of revenge wears red eyeshadow and an intense, angelic look in Park Chan-wook’s last entry in his dazzling Vengeance Trilogy. Lady Vengeance is a perilous venture into the psychology of a woman pursuing her personal sense of justice — without ever finding salvation. Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) has been imprisoned for 13 years for allegedly kidnapping and murdering a six-year-old boy. With her fascinating mixture of evil wisdom and naïveté, she wastes no time in winning over her cellmates’ sympathies; all the prisoners become instrumental in the scheme Geum-ja has meticulously drafted for her future as a free woman.
Walking a thin tightrope between compassion and repulsion, Park confidently masters the complex narrative of this scalding moral tale. He sculpts edgy characters whose strength is defined by their ambiguity: irreparably damaged by wrongs committed against them, their obsessive drive for revenge nonetheless takes on a sinister hue. Without failing to cast a piercing glance at a society that abandons its citizens to their own private rule of law, Lady Vengeance investigates the lonely recesses of a lucid, wounded mind and renders the astonishing portrait of a sombre heroine whose heart is as pure — and as cold — as snow.
GIOVANNA FULVI
Official Selection, 2005 Toronto International Film Festival
Content advisory: explicit violence, sexually suggestive scenes
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