Lady Vengeance (2005)

directed by Park Chan-wook

Jasmin Barré

Sink as far down as you can be pulled up / Happiness really ain’t all about luck

— “A Hero’s Death,”  Fontaines D.C.

COVID swallowed my final year of university whole; it reached a point where moving back to be with my family in Germany was the only option. Zoom lessons became something I gave up on hastily and easily—if the mandatory aspect of being presentable and ready for my lectures was removed, it all felt like a farce. A world eating itself. My heart and mind felt vacant of anything that wasn’t adjacent to panic or sadness, sloshing through me on repeat. A pandemic happening the year you’re supposed to graduate is terrifying. It goes without saying that I was always lucky to have a roof over my head, and remained physically healthy. However, a time of guaranteed uncertainty holding hands with a new type of global uncertainty, felt like having my guts clawed out from inside of me by way of my mouth. Everything already felt stolen, before my supposed professional life had even begun. I’ve moved back and forth, for a myriad of reasons throughout my life, and the unsettled nature of this compulsory transience had always stuck to my skin, living within my disposition. So once again, I moved back. I’m still here four years later.

Once back in Germany, I found my already clattered self even more lost, by trying to fit back into the puzzle of my family’s life. My mother and siblings moved into a new place whilst I was in London, a smaller apartment that didn’t include the extra room or space that would have been considered, had I still been around. Sleeping on the sofa, my depression was thrust into my family’s life and became a centrepiece. As I finished my degree long-distance, unceremoniously by the skin of my teeth, I looked for any job that would have me. When I look back on how bleak my existence felt, how empty it all was, it feels kind of inevitable that I’d devote myself to becoming a cinephile, or any pursuit of discovering art that could distract me or even make my own image of myself sharper and worthy in my own mind. Unexpectedly, and maybe through my boredom, film carved out a place for me. Evenings were my refuge. I’d count down the minutes until my mother was going to sleep, so that I could connect the HDMI cable to my laptop and get to watching whatever tickled my fancy, whatever world I felt the need to explore before sleepiness possessed me.

The gnarly and uncomfortable nature of Park Chan-wook's vengeance trilogy, shrouded in mystical reputation, has always been something I was distantly aware of. The darkness, the potential twists and turns, the idea that you need to be able to have a certain stomach for it all. Through my personal darkness, I found comfort in a director I hadn’t previously explored in depth. In the final installment of his trilogy, Lady Vengeance, Lee Yeong-ae plays Geum-ja, a woman who has been in jail for thirteen years for the kidnapping of a young boy. A crime that, we soon learn, she was blackmailed by a teacher named Mr. Baek (played by Oldboy lead actor Choi Min-sik) into confessing to. Watching her thirteen-year-long revenge plan against Mr. Baek expand left me enthralled. The story progresses onward, with flashbacks to various moments in Geum-ja's prison life and different relationships with the women she meets up with now that she is free.

The Korean title of the film translates to: Kind-hearted Ms. Geum-ja. Even through the poster, illustrating Geum-ja as the Virgin Mary, I was instantly struck by an innocence and purity, which Park Chan-wook toys with throughout. The first image the film presents us with is a Christian musical procession awaiting Geum-ja outside the prison gates, with a block of tofu. Instantly, through the perspective of a preacher (Kim Byeong-ok), the backstory of Geum-ja commences, portraying how she became a reformed sensation due to her angelic feminine purity. When face-to-face with this preacher during her first moment of freedom, she tells him to screw himself, leaving him torn asunder and shaken by her not being everything that he projected onto her. From this moment on, she goes from pure angel to femme fatale with a statement red eyeshadow, morphing her existence and femininity into whatever favoured her motives of revenge in differing moments of her life. Despite the extremity and mercilessness of her situation, I felt incredibly understood in that moment. In that position, who wouldn’t take shape into whatever was necessary for survival? Life can make it compulsory to shed identity for the sake of survival, the entire concept becomes secondary.

Geum-ja is far from perfect–an understandably damaged woman who was wronged, seeking out her daughter who was adopted by Australian parents, and wronging her also in the process. Geum-ja instantly charms the adoptive parents of her daughter, now called Jenny, who begs to go back to Seoul with her birth mother. This muddying of both the revenge plan and a child’s life puts the character who has been presented so meticulously in a far more human light. It is evident that she is not capable of raising a child, making the film also an incredibly singular portrayal of a woman trying to have it all. That is the aspect of Geum-ja that is most appealing. A protagonist who is in some ways the most feminine, the purest, and knows how to position herself to get what she wants, still manages to be filled to the brim with misjudgement, contradictions, and sensitivity. She understands revenge, not solely through violence, but through her own suffering. Through the films, I feel the heartbeat of the core belief that one must experience and witness suffering to be fully motivated to stop it.

Dedicating a life to vengeance is dedicating yourself to live in your own sorrow—even once justice has been achieved, you are left in a debris of heartache. What I understood most clearly about Park Chan-wook’s storytelling within this trilogy and Lady Vengeance specifically, is that art utterly drenched in bleakness exists to remind us of hope. Showing the opposite so clearly and ruthlessly didn’t read as a statement on how we should all give up, but rather as a reminder to me at my most low moment about the other side of it all. After Geum-ja shows the parents of the children tortured by Mr. Baek the footage of what their children were put through, they ultimately decide to take turns torturing him. This is a change from the more self-contained narratives of the other two parts of the trilogy, making the viewer shift focus from Geum-ja to what is ultimately a community and family issue, the potential mending of the suffering of others painting her pursuit as worthy. The film fades slowly to black and white, losing its colour as we approach the act of vengeance. The last few scenes being a balancing act of heartbreak, macabre, anger, love, as all the parents and Geum-ja sit together at a table and have a sing in the darkness, a celebration of their own seeking of catharsis, whether they have achieved it or not. The pain hasn’t vanished, it may never be capable of completely doing so, but there is a solace in Geum-ja being free from her plan, in getting to play herself again.

I look back on that period, around the time when I first watched this movie, as my lowest moment; my memory is littered with depressive breakdowns and episodes from that time. Reflectively, when I think about my situation, it’s not much different to my present life. I still don’t have a perfect job and I’d still rather be in London than here. The highlight reel of my existence so far remains painted by memories of here and memories of there. I have experienced a great deal of sorrow in both places, but the mosaics in my mind that belong to London specifically are always glistening with more vigour and delight. Somehow, even though what I would prefer for myself hasn’t shifted, the way I interact with it all has. I didn’t reinvent myself–there was no red eyeshadow like the one Geum-ja wears in this film, and I had no perpetrators to take a great revenge on, unless circumstances wanted to morph into a person and face me. I simply pushed through, stumbled often, took care of myself, and lived on.

Jasmin Barré is a Somali-German writer. She writes literary fiction, personal essays, and cultural criticism. Relationships, home, and identity are the things she loves musing on the most. You can usually find her spending her free time bingeing auteur’s filmographies and making way-too-long playlists. Find her on Twitter: @jasbarre.