The Duellists (1977); Lady Vengeance (2005)

Every time I see Keith Carradine in a movie, I always, without fail, ask Joe, "who's that actor? He looks familiar." Each and every single time, Joe replies, “It’s Keith Carradine.” I asked this question through all the Alan Rudolph films we watched, as well as Nashville. Why can’t I remember who he is? So, again, when we were watching Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (his first feature). The film follows Carradine and Keitel throughout the years as they challenge each other to duel after duel. “Who is that guy?” I said to Joe. This time, he just laughed. In any case, the film is beautifully, stunningly shot, and even though at first I made fun of Carradine and Harvey Keitel’s costumes (the sidebraids and foppish hats made them hard to take seriously at first), I eventually ended up enjoying it. The ending made revenge a very dignified, gentlemanly affair.

For Park Chanwook, however, revenge is a dish served best to your nemesis-turned-victim while he is still conscious, so that you can both fully savour the torture. Lady Vengeance is the third in his revenge trilogy, of which Oldboy is probably his best work. We loved Oldboy, but none of his other films have come close, save J.S.A.:Joint Security Area (not part of the revenge trilogy, but a tense political thriller set on the border of North and South Korea). Lady Vengeance has been at the top of our to-rent list for a long time, and it finally arrived to much anticipation. Hooray! The same kind of lush stylistics, over-the-top camera work and intense violence. I was into it, savouring the twists of plot, the crazy digital edits, the cartoon-like action scenes.

But then, in the flow of the gorgeous credit graphics, remarkably inventive camerawork and editing, and twisty, harrowing plot turns, came one scene that just made Joe and I turn the movie off. It was too much! The scene shows children in what are practically snuff films (a child murderer films his victims crying to their parents for help), which is worse than gratuitous, it’s seriously cretinous. Even if it’s not real. Granted, Joe and I might be particularly sensitive because we’re parents, but come on! One kid was in a noose, crying that he couldn’t breathe. “Think about those child actors!” Joe said. “Imagine having to be in a scene like that? They’re not old enough to not be affected! How could any cretin let their kid do that? WHAT’S WRONG WITH PEOPLE TODAY?!”

The next evening, we fast-forwarded through the objectionable parts, as well as much of the rest of the film. We watched the ending, just to see what would happen. Lots of blood and some slapstick, none of the choreographed grace that marked Old Boy’s hammer scene. In the end, it might have been not a bad film, but it was just ruined by intolerable excess. I don’t like kids in my violence, nor do I like too realistic violence, and that brings me to a whole other can of worms: what is the point of realistic violence? Why do people get off or otherwise feel they should endure depictions of other people’s pain? Is it cathartic, or masochistic, or an attempt to look at the world’s horrors in the face? Why does it need to be so unrelenting? But that’s a tangent that is too off-course to get into here. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, but I’ll pursue it elsewhere else.