"I Want Revenge" kicked off Park Chan-wook's revenge trilogy, which became the starting point for Park Chan-wook to establish a strong personal aesthetic style.
The story is set in a period of depression in the South Korean economy, during which unemployment, the divide between rich and poor, class antagonism, and evil desires are exposed, not least like the incompetent police and the disorderly society on the verge of collapse.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="3" > full revenge</h1>
Shen Hajun plays the green-haired young man Ah You, a deaf-mute who lives at the bottom of society, and he works as a coolie in a factory.
In order to win a suitable organ transplant for his seriously ill sister, Ah You helplessly found the underground tissue that sold organs and exchanged the organs for money, but after waking up from anesthesia, people and money were empty, his organs were gone, and the 10 million won that saved his life was also cheated out.
When Ah You was desperate, his girlfriend instigated him, and he decided to kidnap the daughter of the factory director Dong Jin, thinking that he would only take money and not hurt anyone, and the original plan was very smooth.
But just when Ah You got the ransom and returned home, his sister committed suicide in the bathtub because he did not want to drag him down, and the desperate Ah You took the daughter of the factory director to the river in the suburbs to bury his sister, but because of deafness, he did not hear the girl's cries for help in the water.
In this way, the child drowned in the water. Soon, the girl's body is found by the police, and the father played by Song Kang-ho vows to kill the kidnappers, and he finds Yingmei by bribing the police to obtain information, and tortures him to death with electric shocks.
At the same time, Ah You also found the three people who had previously sold organs, and he retaliated and massacred them. When this Ah You came home and encountered the police carrying the bodies of his girlfriends in the elevator, the emotion of revenge broke out again.
Ah You returned to his former accommodation alone, but was determined to take revenge, and Dong Jin, who had long been ambushed here, was electrocuted. Dong Jin took him to the river where his daughter had an accident, cut off his ankle tendons, and witnessed Ah You drowned alive.
When Dongjin was preparing to bury the body, a car came from a distance, and four men with numb expressions and cigarettes on their mouths got out of the car, and without saying a word, they each stabbed Dongjin.
Eventually, DongJin struggles to look at the paper with a knife stuck to his chest, and the movie ends in this picture.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" > the formal beauty of minimalism</h1>
Through an exquisite narrative structure, the film takes the revenge of the deaf-mute young ah you as the main line and the revenge of the factory owner Dong Jin as the secondary line, and interlocks two absurd and out-of-control but real and repressed revenge stories.
Originally two people who were kind and innocent, but slipped from the normal track of life, after a period of forced helplessness, the evil in human nature was deformed and magnified, and eventually led to the tragedy of mutual slaughter.
What is even more tragic is that there is a certain moral rationality in their mutual slaughter. The theme of revenge explored by Park Chan-wook with the main line superimposed on the side line is not just "the pure catharsis of the weak to fight violence with violence", but the deeper proposition that "human actions that begin with good intentions also lead to evil results".
In the movie, Dong Jin dragged Ah You into the river to kill him before saying that, are the best interpretation of this theme. In fact, as one of the earliest works in the revenge trilogy, "I Want Revenge" is far less popular than the other two.
But after I re-read it, I instead thought that Park Chan-wook's experimental work of constructing personal images or aesthetic style was the best of his trilogy.
Park Chan-wook's original intention in creating this film is actually more interesting, he said in the film notes, because the Korean film industry at that time was overwhelmed by the current situation of relying on a lot of dialogue to tell stories, so he decided to make a film with deaf and mute people as the main characters.
Park Chan-wook uses the language of the film itself, such as audio-visual, montage, and actor performance that we usually say, instead of using a dialogue to tell a good story.
Nowadays, it seems that it is precisely this kind of minimalism that is concise and straightforward, without fancy forms, that makes this dramatic tension created by the audiovisual language of the film itself bring a huge sense of shock, achieving the so-called "very little performance, great effect".
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="7" > crazy B-grade style</h1>
In the first ten minutes of the film, the four men across the wall listen to the moans of the woman next door and masturbate, but as the camera pans, the sound across the wall is actually the sister who is rolling on the ground because of the pain.
In the foreground of the picture, the deaf-mute brother is quietly eating noodles, completely unaware of the struggle and pain of the people behind him.
The same technique also appears in the 50 minutes of the film, where Ah You builds a grave for his sister one by one with stones by the river, but the process of the girls drowning in the depths of the scene is perfectly presented, and ah You, who is deaf and mute in the foreground, is also unmoved.
The two sets of shots do not have any dialogue, but through the sharp contrast between the indifference in the foreground of the lens and the life-and-death struggle in the background, Park Chan-wook's mockery and irony of the world is cleverly and accurately conveyed.
At the same time, Park Chan-wook is also good at telling the process and results of things with minimalist lens language and montage extreme efficiency, so as to achieve a certain absurdity.
Shortly after the opening, the protagonist's dismissal from the factory is just a combination of several static pictures, visually showing how quickly the low-level workers are abandoned by capital.
When the camera passes over the girl's tragic death in the river, the picture directly switches from the frightened facial expression of the male protagonist to Dong Jin's desperate face, directly omitting the process of searching.
The film also does not show how DongJin was rescued after being kidnapped by blackmail, and the extremely streamlined montage just shows that everything is leading out of control and absurdity.
Of course, minimalism does not mean that there is no beauty of form, park Chan-wook, who attaches great importance to the sense of form, is extremely exquisite and beautiful in terms of composition and use of mirrors, and each frame seems to have been carefully designed. The close-up of the face at the beginning of the film is accompanied by the narration subtitles, which truly and sensibly presents the daily state of the deaf and mute.
Ah You went to sell organs, was sandwiched between two people to go upstairs, three different scenery ladder of three silhouettes seem to be beautiful, but the silhouette is getting smaller and smaller, the dark part of the gradually getting bigger, indicating that the protagonist is heading for a road of no return.
The scene at the end of the film is also extremely shocking, and the Avenger turns around and becomes the target of revenge.
With the voiceover before Yingmei's death, Dong Jin tried his best to see what was written on the paper with a knife inserted in his chest, trying to figure out who the person who killed him was, but he could not see clearly.
In Dongjin's desperate whispers, the film finally ends with such a ruthlessly desperate, contradictory, and absurd ending.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="9" > summary</h1>
As one of the revenge trilogies, the play is more directly written than "Old Boys" and "Kind of Gold".
When the Avengers embark on their journey, they only have the idea of finding compensation for their lives, and this pleasure suddenly disappears at the moment when the revenge ends.
The short-term satisfaction creates the shock of the drama, and after watching this film, director Park Chan-wook seems to leave us with a question: whether the absurd life gives birth to hatred, or whether hatred leads to a tragic life.