Just this past semester, I did a reaction paper on "Cidade de Deus", which we viewed in class. I focused on the aspect of revenge in the movie, and described it's cycle.
In the past weeks, I'd heard from several people of the movie "Oldboy." Now I know this film, it's quite old, and I saw it when i was really young. There were no downloads then, haha.
"Oldboy" is part of the so-called "Vengeance Trilogy" of films by Park Chan-wook, since they all have the theme of revenge, despite not having any real connections.
Now for most of the people I've heard talking about "Oldboy", many really like it, and a lot are also aware of one other film in the series, "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance." But what I find odd is that almost none of them are aware of the first and most bothering movie of the series, in my opinion, "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance."
"Oldboy" is about a man who is imprisoned in a room for 15 years, after which when he is released does he realize what he had done to deserve what had been done to him. In his youth, he told on a brother and sister who were having a sexual relation, which led to the girl's suicide. The brother plots his revenge, and Oldboy ends up having a sexual relationship with his own daughter.
"Sympathy for Lady Vengeance" or "Kind-hearted Geum-ja" in the original Korean, is about a high school girl imprisoned for a child murder committed by her lover, her teacher, who is saving up money to buy a yacht. Using all the connections she made in prison, she plots vengeance, more so when she discovers that he killed more children after she was incarcerated in his stead. She gathers the parents of all the children and they take turns taking it out on the guy, with all sorts of weapons, but not enough to kill him, which is for Lady Vengeance.
Now, "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," or "Vengeance is Mine" in Korean, is about a deaf-mute guy who was swindled out of money and a kidney by organ dealers, when he was trying to save his sister. He ends up kidnapping his boss' daughter (after he got unjustly fired), just to get money for his sister's surgery. His sister finds out and commits suicide, and the girl drowns accidentally while he was burying his sister, after he had collected the ransom. What ensues is so surreal and f****ed up that it's stupefying. The girl's dad vows revenge, kills the deaf guy's girlfriend (who helped in the kidnap), deaf guy finds the organ dealers and kills them all, and the two end up camping out to kill each other. The father wins over and ultimately kills deaf guy too. However, the father is fatally stabbed by a group of men while he was trying to dispose of deaf guy. They were from the terrorist organization that deaf guy's girlfriend warned him about. She told him if she died they would kill him, but he didn't believe it and killed her anyway. So there was this disbelief in his final moments as he didn't expect such twist.
It's a little tricky to say who's Mr. Vengeance, though I would say its the both of them. But it was really annoying how the father acted in vengeance, and committed more crime. He even killed the noodle delivery boy unnecessarily. His daughter died accidentally, and in a vision she established it was his fault that she died, since he never taught her to swim. Deaf guy, on the other hand, was two-timed, lost his beloved sister, and was really nice to the daughter. In the end his body was chopped up by the father, in such a display of unfairness. But that's life I guess.
Of the three films, I believe Mr. Vengeance is the best, and i wish more people saw it, not just Oldboy or Lady Vengeance.
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