Editor's note: "The Determination to Break Up" is one of the most discussed films in recent times. We have published two film reviews with different perspectives:
"After a long fifteen years, finally another director used the right Tang Wei"
The defeat of "The Determination to Break Up" exposed the big gap between Park Chan-wook and Ang Lee"
Today's article will not talk specifically about the film, mainly want to talk about the director of the film - the Asian genre film master Park Chan-wook.
Wen 丨 Landy
Park Chan-wook is a Korean author-director who is "loved and hated".
"The Determination to Break Up"
On the one hand, his highly recognizable visual style, mixed with fatalistic tyrannical blood, eroticism, absurdity and humor, violent aesthetics makes people indulge; On the other hand, the visual spectacle he painstakingly manages often makes it difficult to conceal superficial and weak stories or themes.
"Revenge" is a lingering theme in Park Chan-wook's works, not only the "Revenge Trilogy" presents us with the complex pull between human revenge and original sin, fate, religion, and redemption, but even in many works before and after the "Trilogy", the audience can also experience Park's consistent fascination with revenge (anti-revenge) from the abnormal intentions and behaviors of the characters.
For example, in the ending of "Common Security Zone" (2000), Lee Byung-hyun, a South Korean soldier played by Lee Byung-hyun, not only swallowed a gun and committed suicide out of guilt, but also the ultimate disobedience and revenge for the difficult-to-bridge ideological struggle between the two Koreas and the recognition of "national heroes"; In Bat (2009), the repressed housewife Tae-joo (Kim Woo-bin) tries to escape from her predicament by luring the vampire-turned-vampire priest Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho) to kill her cancer-stricken husband (Shin Ha-kyun), who often oppresses her; In Stoke (2013), the girl's stumbling upbringing is accompanied by a series of bloody murders and revenge (males who plot against the wrongdoing); Adapted from the British novel Miss (2016), it revolves around two women from different classes who allied themselves against the dirty control of the nobility.
"Common Security Zone"
Park Chan-wook's "Revenge Trilogy" explores the themes associated with different concepts of revenge. "I Want Revenge" (2002) presents us with a "no one survives" Möbius ring, which emphasizes the fatalistic reincarnation of mutual revenge:
Deaf-mute young man Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun) and his girlfriend (Bae Doona) have no choice but to embark on the criminal road of kidnapping a rich family's children in order to make their terminally ill sister recover, but accidentally drown the daughter of factory owner Dong Jin (Song Kanghao). The distraught Dongjin only wants to find out the murderer of his daughter to complete his revenge; On the other hand, Ryu's revenge for losing his beloved sister is the rebellious black market businessman (it is precisely because of the deception of the cost of treatment that the desperate Ryu and his girlfriend think of kidnapping).
"I Want Revenge"
After a series of pursuits and killings, DongJin ends Ryu's life where his daughter drowns, which echoes the scene of Dong Jin's self-harm by a dismissed employee while driving in the early part of the film: "Revenge" (psychological impulse - behavioral logic) has no class distinction.
The well-off factory owner can highlight his class superiority by giving him monetary aid or paying kidnappers a huge ransom, but in the face of the strong hatred of "wanting to kill someone", he is equal to the poor masses of the lower classes, bound by the wheel of fate that overrides all living beings. Just as the characters and the audience realized this, Dongjin's life also ushered in the final end.
Park Chan-wook has deliberately blurred the line between good and evil in the process of crime and revenge in the first part, Ryu's original intention of committing the crime of kidnapping was only to raise money for the treatment of his cancer sister, and the film also focuses on his monotonous daily life, his pure good character, and intimate relationship with his girlfriend in the first half of the film. After the successful kidnapping, Ryu and his family also took good care of Dongjin's daughter, fearing that she would be hurt.
It is precisely because the source of the sin is the simple goodwill of doing everything possible to save the family, and the subsequent evil deeds make people feel deeply contradictory, and Park's cold eyes through the wide-angle long lens and the overhead camera are also the people who are trapped in the revenge impulse of different purposes, and the desperate situation of doom: Ryu killed all the people of the black market organization that sold kidneys after his sister's death, but they did not sin to death; Dongjin kills Ryu's girlfriend and the innocent delivery man in the process of finding the enemy.
In addition, Dongjin said before killing Ryu, "I know you are a good person, but I must kill you", if combined with the English title "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance", can the revenge of the avengers (and being pitied) suppress the multiplication of evil in time? Park's answer is negative through Dong Jin's reaction to being devoured by the evil consequences of revenge.
The following year, Old Boys (2003) linked revenge to concepts such as original human sin and redemption. On her daughter's birthday, wu daxiu (Choi Min-sik), who was kidnapped and missing by unidentified people and imprisoned for 15 years, is desperate to find the reason for his imprisonment and the black hand behind all this manipulation after being released.
"Old Boys"
The film also provides two narrative paths, one is that Wu Daxiu constantly goes back and examines the various sins he has committed in the past, in order to find the "cause" that can explain the current disaster; The other is how Wu Daxiu and the accidental acquaintance of Mei Dao (Kang Huizhen) were hypnotized, fell in love with each other, committed the "original sin" of father-daughter incest (which also indirectly pointed to the source of the whole incident), and the Hong Kong translation title "Original Criminal" believes that it can better convey the core theme of the film.
Park Chan-wook's reflections on revenge in the trilogy are layered on a step-by-step basis, and "Old Boy" abandons the relatively simple closed-loop structure of "I Want Revenge", and one revenge no longer appears immediately after another, or constitutes a close causal relationship.
The emotionally driven Wu Daxiu and the scheming Li Youzhen (Liu Zhitai), the revenge plan of the two is carried out at the same time, and the choices made by one party will inevitably have a substantial impact on the implementation of the other party's plan, and the fundamental driving force for their revenge is the "love" that continues: Li Youzhen is out of the love of his sister who chose to live lightly because she could not withstand the gossip, and only after her death did she generate hatred that was difficult to extinguish; In addition to the anger that has accumulated over the years of unprovoked imprisonment, Wu Daxiu is also accompanied by the deep grief of the murder of his beloved wife and the unknown whereabouts of his daughter.
Park's "Old Boys" shows the cruel journey of these two avengers who resent each other chasing and harming each other, and gradually unveils a gray area of hatred and love behind the seemingly overheated violent spectacle.
Different from the happy revenge of Woo Woo-sen's films, the nihilistic violence that Sam Perkinpa strives to render, or the unbridled fighting of Takashi Miike, Park Chan-wook's violent aesthetics neither bears the lofty meaning of purifying the soul, nor is it a blind opposition between good and evil, and the violent justice theory of eye for eye (who is right?). Who is evil? ), but it is a manifestation of "tenderness" hidden in the vortex of violence.
Such tenderness (including the mercy between the avengers in "I Want Revenge") is not eager to blame the guilt on a certain individual, it should be said that the main characters in the film are both the perpetrators of the tragedy and the victims under the flames of revenge, but observe them with a sad and compassionate gaze, without any prejudice.
Park believes that the real "original culprits" who constitute human disasters cannot be easily eliminated by individual acts of revenge alone, but people still regard desperate revenge as the only way to seek and achieve ultimate salvation.
Li Youzhen knows that Wu Daxiu, who only relies on one sentence, will not be the culprit who caused his sister to commit suicide, and the real murderer is the demonization and stigmatization of incest by the traditional ethics of society, but ignores the true love between individuals, so Li Youzhen can only pour all his anger into Wu Daxiu, the "source" that makes the rumor spread, in order to retaliate for the rejection of incest by the entire social system.
Of course, Wu Daxiu failed to cross this huge barrier established by society, but his strong motivation for revenge finally changed to kneeling to his former enemies and begging for forgiveness, because at that moment, his love and protection for his daughter trumped all the world, and even made him willing to give up the violence that could kill the other party. Dae-so's cutting off of his tongue is both to avoid his daughter from learning the truth, and park's fierce protest against cannibalistic social speech through the extreme way in which people physically harm themselves in the play.
"Love" is both the cause of the tragedy of revenge and the answer to redemption, Park Chan-wook said: Instead of feeling a little joy, Lee Yoo-jin, who has been revenge for the great revenge, ends his life by suicide (similar to the tragic death of Dong Jin in "I Want Revenge"); Although Wu Daxiu, who gave up revenge, chose to hypnotize amnesia, a wave of love accompanied by pain emerged when he embraced Mei Dao.
As the final chapter of the trilogy, Park Chan-wook introduces the relationship between revenge and religion on the basis of continuing the revenge theme of the first two films, "Crime and Punishment", further enriching his complex and intractable black style of love and hate, good and evil.
Jin Zi (Lee Young-ae), imprisoned for manslaughter, is a combination of saints/witches, who are friendly in prison and feel like reincarnated bodhisattvas in the eyes of other inmates; On the other hand, she is also a murderous avenger, and it can be seen from kaneko's gathering of former inmates who have been favored by him to carry out a long-simmering revenge plan as soon as kane is released, and the kindness and closeness shown in prison life is only to increase the number of people for the future implementation of revenge plans.
"Kind of Gold"
The polysemy of the image of the gold religion, and the "righteous deeds" that have a strong purpose and demand substantial return, are just a slap in the face to the hypocritical nature of modern religions: why don't pastors who claim to be "pure and immaculate" secretly accept bribes and do unrighteous deeds?
The first half of the film starts from the perspective of several of Kaneko's former inmates, slowly sketching the cold and charming image of Kaneko being both good and evil, and the over-showmanship of the transition and gorgeous editing complement Kaneko's ritualistic eye makeup and costumes, as well as the uniquely shaped execution pistol.
Later in the film, when Kaneko discovers that Mr. Bai is actually a serial murderer who has committed multiple child murders, she instead invites the victim's family to participate in a collective execution, at which point the film transforms from the dark fairy tale at the beginning to a realistic group revenge. Kaneko set up the execution ground in a dilapidated classroom, and she served as the supreme judge in the inquisition, broadcasting to the family a video of Teacher Bai's torture of innocent children (reading out the charges), and inciting the families to bypass the time-consuming and rational judicial system and directly punish the sinners.
At first, the family members were still talking about the law's intervention, but Kaneko's unwavering tone and the use of moral "justice" to legalize/rationalize the lynching soon dispelled the doubts of the participants. Throughout the execution, Kaneko's face was expressionless, and she coldly watched as her family members executed the enemy in front of her.
The golden gaze, which symbolizes the religious moral law, reflects the complex emotions of fear, hesitation, pain, and pleasure displayed by the victim's family at the moment when the enemy is about to be stabbed, and I believe this is the main purpose of Park Chan-wook's deliberate arrangement of this scene.
The "voice" is heavily amplified here, and every horrific opening of the door by the families is both the execution of the murderer and the fact that they are waiting to receive the punishment of revenge. Here, Park also returns to the most fundamental question of revenge: can revenge effectively fill the long-scarce void in the victim's heart?
Park's small gathering after the collective execution gives the answer, revenge can only bring temporary spiritual comfort to the victim's family (feeling the illusion of the angel chanting), after which they have to face the long torture of life, so they will ask for gold to pay back the ransom, worried that the snow and wind at night are too big to return home.
At the end of the film, since we have witnessed a lynching based on moral law being perfectly executed, and human justice seems to be re-named in this way, why is Jinzi still crying and can't speak freely? The reason is that she realizes that this religious/moral law that takes effect for a short time is ultimately powerless, that revenge (cathartic) is ultimately invalid, and that it can never fill the huge shadow that has always existed in her heart.
Kaneko's tears (confession) together with Dong Jin's "Revenge And Recoil" and Lee Yoo Jin's suicide by swallowing a gun constitute a heartbreaking and desperate trilogy ending.
After the "Revenge Trilogy", although Park Chan-wook let go of the heavy burden of revenge, the theme content of the contradictions that show the dark side of human nature, such as original sin and redemption, is still mostly found in his successor works.
It must be noted that the ambiguous "love" of this period replaced the heart-wrenching revenge as the primary element of Park Chan-wook's films. "The Bat" is a new generation of vampire movies with love and temptation, spirit and flesh struggle as the core of the story.
The Bat (2009)
Father Sang Hyun, played by Song Kang-ho, is a devout believer who, after witnessing the death of a patient who voluntarily participates in biological experiments with the goal of saving the world, is deeply desperate for the inability of religious beliefs in the face of illness and death; When he becomes a vampire who can only survive on blood, it is a miracle to defeat the virus in the eyes of others.
The cold humor of the film is mostly derived from the contradiction between this external behavior and internal changes, and then the priest and his childhood playmate Kang Yu are reunited, which also means the beginning of his betrayal of friends. The priest must always maintain a serious superficial identity, but the devout Christian faith in the heart is always fighting against the vampire's bloodthirsty instinct, and when he can no longer suppress the instinct, the comical scene of falling to the ground and sucking blood and the father's ascetic and solemn impression often makes the audience laugh.
Jin Yubin's beautiful wife Tae Ju is the second contradiction encountered by the priest, the former in order to escape from the family predicament of being bullied by the sick husband and the terrible mother-in-law, so he lured the priest to break the ring with physical sex, and instigated the latter to murder his husband, somewhat similar to the traditional film noir that makes the man fascinated by the "snake and scorpion beauty" image. At this time, the priest has more than just the instinctive struggle of "should not suck blood", and the dark side that is gradually covered contains a sense of guilt like the abyss.
Park Chan-wook's cruel and absurd sense of humor plays a huge role here, with the corpse of her dead husband (hallucination?). Constantly pestering Sang-hyun and Tae-joo, and even "getting involved" when the two have sex. When Sang-hyun's world is completely replaced by night, it means that the doctrinal creeds that he must uphold as a priest have completely collapsed, and the unstable love with Tae-ju has become the only faith of Sang-hyun who has fallen into darkness.
The passage where Tae-joo is killed and resurrected by Sang-hyun shows the contradiction of love's wobble in Park Chan-wook's eyes: Sang-hyun's love for Tae-ju makes him fulfill her wish to die, but because of this inseparable feeling, he can't bear to see his lover leave his Sang-hyun and bring Tae-ju back to the world.
As the vampire-like Tae-ju hunts unarmed humans more and more recklessly, Sang-hyun encounters a third paradox: should he continue to tolerate the evil deeds of his lover, or should he go to Huangquan with him to complete the faith of saving the world? This time, the latter finally had the upper hand.
For the priest, if he lived in the night at the cost of the lives of many innocent people, he would rather live in hell with his beloved, and the ultimate executor could only be the dawn of the rising sun.
Park's complex treatment of romanticization, fairytale, tragedy/comedy in the climactic scene at the end, the minute-long confrontation between the two has no dialogue, only the clever scheduling of body language, and a heart to die without hesitation. Witnessed by the Crimson Sea of Blood, a pair of lovers greet eternal life with death, and the ashes that shimmer in ashes despite decay are the perfect combination of beauty and cruelty that Park Chan-wook can compose for love.
Here I analyze Park Chan-wook's "Stoker" filmed in Hollywood and the later Korean local production "Miss", not only because these two works reflect Park Chan-wook's new attempt to seek a breakthrough in the female narrative perspective (the so-called "female perspective" in "Kind of Gold" is more inclined to Park's consistent male violent perspective), and since then, Park Chan-wook's weakness of heavy technology, style and light text has gradually been exposed, and in the past in the "Revenge Trilogy" and "Bat", the past in the "Revenge Trilogy" and "Bat" Lippo can make up for the thin text or the lack of psychological details of character behavior through layer-by-layer revenge thinking, or through the complex ambiguity caused by the pull between sin, love, and redemption.
Stoke
"Stoker" tells the story of the spiritual transformation of a young girl (Mia Huaxikovoska) after learning that her young uncle (Matthew Goody) is a murderer, and the script is clearly based on Hitchcock's "Hot Hands Destroying Flowers" (1943), the former of which adapts the classic suspenseful work depicting the inner moral struggle of the niece and the multiple transmutations of the relationship with the uncle into a female awakening story with similar bloodthirsty genes to her uncle, supplemented by the difficulties and discrimination encountered by the girl in the process of growing up, sexual consciousness and other elements involving the transformation of female identity But the extremely poor textual content and rough characterization have kept me from one superficial metaphor and symbol after another.
Despite Park's considerate visual and auditory efforts, the film's exquisite tones, textures, ornate transition designs, and imaginative montages, the weak characters who have become inferior psychoanalytic tools can only remind me of the various precious "specimens" placed prominently in the study, usually skilled hunters who deliberately show their prey and loot to visiting guests in order to show their extraordinary technical achievements.
If you look at it from another perspective, this may also involve how Park Chan-wook views the female characters in his lens, park has always been good at writing about the frustration of men (gazing) themselves from a male perspective, such as "Old Boy", "Bat", and the new work "The Determination to Break Up" are among the best, but when Park claims to have shifted the main perspective from male to female, the real problem surfaces.
In my opinion, "Miss" is such a work, and its most criticized place is not park Chan-wook's explicit display of female lust, it should be said that not shying away from showing the flow of lust between women is undoubtedly quite important for a film with women forming alliances to escape patriarchal control as the core of the story.
"Miss"
On the contrary, the overly designed finishing shot prevents women's lust from flowing further to the whole picture. Unruly "chaos" never appears in Park Chan-wook's dictionary, and while erotic literature full of male gazes and sitting precariously seems to be destroyed by two female characters who break through class barriers, Park tells the audience through the symmetrical composition of the two heroines' naked sideways intersection at the end that the "order" dominated by male gazes will not disappear.
Their thin paper-like figures and postures (as symmetrical and neat as the composition of the asana presentation at the recital) have become incomparably delicate human specimens, which are placed in beautifully shaped boxes or in frames such as scrolls for guests/viewers to scrutinize, with the only difference being that the destroyed novel content is converted into colorful images.
"I'm just an old man who likes dirty stories", and this line from last month's teaching in the film may be enough to summarize Park Chan-wook's real intention behind the superficial narrative of feminist winning the game, and the "obscene" perspective disguised as a female perspective is precisely narrow and orderly, and always has to end with a moral preaching that advises good and punishes evil (women win) after the most obscene imagination of hunting.
The sex scene between the two heroines, the camera seems to be Kim Tae-ri's next daughter Lady Ji sandwiched between the legs of Miss Sooko (Kim Min-hee) to see the infinite spring light, but in fact, park who is hiding behind the camera is interestingly peeping at all this, which reminds me of a similar scene in "Bat": the priest and Tae Joo's first caress, Tae Joo also licks the scars left by the whipping under the priest's crotch. When the voyeuristic perspective occupies the center of the picture, I can't help but ask: Where should I place the love of the two girls?
Park Chan-wook's evolution of the emotional relationship between the two heroines in "Miss" is also a lack of necessary preparation, and the plot reversal in the second part is not so much a naïve idealism, but rather highlights Park's focus on spectacle display and style creation, while the script and character polishing are seriously lame.
Although the film takes the colonial period as the background of the story, it avoids talking about the identity gap and social background between Xiuzi and Shuji, and has no depth in the inner thoughts or dark side portrayal of the two female characters, and the characters under the multi-perspective narrative are as pure as boiling water, which is absolutely unimaginable in Park's early works.
Looking at Park Chan-wook's sequence of works, since in the "Revenge Trilogy" and "Bat", Park often uses the complex relationships between different themes to create dramatic tension (game-style narrative), the story often takes place in a completely overhead or semi-overhead social environment ("Common Security Zone" is an exception), and is usually dominated by a failed male perspective full of anxiety, melancholy, and repression, in this case Park Chan-wook can better play the violent erotic aesthetic and smooth and gorgeous audio-visual skills than other directors of the same period. Mask the problems of text and characters with highly stylized audiovisual language.
"Old Boys"
By the time of "Stoke" and "Miss", Although Park Chan-wook struggled to maintain his trademark suspense design and exquisite style, he was already a bit unable to hold back many of the shortcomings and loopholes in the growth of the characters. The actors gradually become empty props, making their films more and more into the dilemma of "specimen films".
In short, he began to lose the desire to express.