Sunday, April 09, 2006

Park Chanwook

A good story by Ian Buruma on a great film director, Park Chanwook. If you missed the US release of "Old Boy" last year, you missed one of the best films of the year (which, of course, Hollywood is going to remake for some idiotic reason). His "Lady Vengeance" will be released this month.

It's violent stuff, but not the usual Asian cinematic violence or American jingoistic and orgasmic gross-out violence. It's a serious mistake to take Park to be replicating Tarantino's I'm-just-too-clever inside-joke violence. Park's is challenging violence held up by the perpetually unresolved ethical conflict of vengeance. Living in violent societies, the challenge is important if we're not to become entirely inured to all of its forms except the most immediately personal. I truly worry about this sedimentation regarding the casual air of Americans about torture, for instance, that Americans commit, and the anger at distant and poorly understood violent acts of non-Americans. Park doesn't join in the politics explicitly, but he plays with the comfort zones we settle into with cultural and political violence.
..."The father," Park continued, "has picked up his ax. His daughter tries to restrain him. The audience expects her to say something like, 'No, don't do it!' Instead, she asks him to leave the victim alive, so the rest of the family can also have a go at him. The audience laughs. The next shot shows the father with his ax dripping blood, terrified of what he has just done. The audience can't be cynical anymore and regrets having laughed at the preparation for such a brutal act."....

2 comments:

Neil Shakespeare said...

thanks for the recommendation. i'll have to check him out. i've heard of him but haven't seen anything of his as of yet.

helmut said...

Oh, and Oldboy does have one of the best fight scenes - the one in the hallway, shot down the length of the hallway - I've seen in years. Everyone gets tired.