#61 Lady Vengeance

Okay, well if you're going to have a violent antihero protagonist, at least do it right.

I'm sorry but the Kill Bill comparison is unavoidable. I want a signed release form saying each director was unaware of each other's movie so both can remain untainted in my mind. Not that I'm not aware of Tarantino's borrowings, but dammit, at least he picks good sources.

The set design in this movie is just stunning. Her bedroom when she leaves prison

So yes, like The Bride (or maybe the Bride is like Lady Vengeance. I refuse to consider any timelines), Lee Geum-ja is out for revenge. She has been framed for murder by a man who has taken her child away from her and sent to prison for 13 years for a crime he committed. And he will pay.

But instead of relying on assassin and martial arts skills, she gets to him with careful planning, a network of friends that she made on the inside, and an ornate antique pistol that she will not hesitate to use.

Along the way there's the usual noir touches, as the bright beginning slowly gets all the color bleached out of it until the end is faded colors and black and white. Cigarettes in bed, a naive young and loyal lover for the ex-con, decaying abandoned buildings, a disenchanted homicide cop that knows there's more to the case, an innocent child representing the life that the heroine could have had, and a villain that's so black-hearted that you don't doubt for a second that he has ruined her life and couldn't care less about it.

The villain's my only complaint actually. I'm still not sure what I think about plot twist at the end, but let's just say it complicates the idea of him getting a hot load of lead vengeance blown out the back of his head even less. Is it now even to the point that it's cliche to humanize the villain a little? Make the wronged hero a little bit in the gray area? Is it now avante garde for him to be even worse than you thought, and have no mitigating circumstances behind his crime against the hero but that he's dyed in the wool evil? I don't know but at least they do some interesting things with it after that.

I'm seriously going to have to watch a lot of Korean movies. Between this, The Host, The Good, The Bad the Weird, A Bittersweet Life...and the good things I've heard about all those directors' other films, there are a lot of beautiful visuals and fantastic storytelling coming out of that country's film industry.