Review: Pieta (2012)
Cast: Min-soo Jo, Jeong-jin Lee, Ki-Hong Woo
Director: Ki-duk Kim
Country: South Korea
Genre: Drama
Official Trailer: Here
Editor’s Notes: Pieta opens at TIFF Bell Lightbox this Friday, May 31st. For more information on Pieta as well as additional TIFF releases visit TIFF.net and follow TIFF on Twitter @TIFF_NET.
After his latest morality tale upset P.T Anderson’s The Master at the Venice Film Festival, writer/director Ki-duk Kim faced a lot of divided praise over this chimera of a movie. If you walked out of Pieta with twenty minutes to go you might be forgiven thinking it was an exploitation film is arthouse clothing. It takes some getting into, but the effort is well worth it. Kim soars back into top form with a multi-layered allegory of revenge, obligation, family honour, and sheer horror.
It takes some getting into to, but the effort is well worth it. Kim soars back into top form with a multi-layered allegory of revenge, obligation, family honour, and sheer horror.
Kim’s primary talent has always been to make you feel warmth for the coldest hearts. His protagonist, Gang-do (Jeong-jin Lee), roams the industrial slums of Cheochenyong, collecting debts for gangsters. When clients can’t pay, he cripples them with their own machinery – Kim’s fetish for hooks and metal-on-flesh from The Isle persists – to collect their insurance claims for workplace injuries.
Lee is an icy anti-hero with room to develop, peering through frosty windows to leer at his terrified charges. A mysterious woman (Min-soo Jo), claiming to be his mother, enters his sordid life and begins living with him. Their relationship is almost perfectly poised between attraction and repulsion throughout taboo-breaking set pieces. This is somewhat of a Kim commonplace, whether it’s animal violence, rape, or self-mutilation. Once the initially shock wears off, each transgression leads to a complex development in Gang-do’s character, and for a while it seems he is on the clichéd road to redemption, but through the least clichéd methods.
Sometimes Pieta strays out of art house and into grindhouse, and punches above its nail-biting grittiness. One expertly thrown knife is just a touch too slick; a few zooming cameras too spastic for the otherwise hovering cinematography. That these things jump out at you is a testament to Kim’s tightly honed aesthetic, maybe too spare for some.
When he is in control, Kim manipulates us with dread and violence like a Korean Haneke. He gets us close and intimate with the horrific Gang-do, before we realize it’s the woman claiming to be his mother who may be the darker soul. Somewhere in the mix there is a Christian allegory (the pieta is the image of the Virgin cradling a dead Jesus), but more interestingly a comment on a ravaged working class, literally selling flesh for cash. There are also funny moments for those who are watching, like the “mother” asking Gang-do what he did to an indebted client with the domestic cadence of how-was-your-day chatter.
Sometimes Pieta strays out or art house and into grindhouse, and punches above its nail-biting grittiness. One expertly thrown knife is just a touch too slick; a few zooming cameras too spastic for the otherwise hovering cinematography.
As the couple reverse roles and their past injustices are slowly brought to the surface, Pieta puts you through a series of final twists that come with a huge payoff. The film changes direction, its central message suddenly painfully clear. I cannot think of a recent film whose ending had such a profound impact on how a viewer retroactively sees the rest of the film.
In all fairness to Pieta’s many detractors, it is almost manipulative how Kim justifies the wretched torture of the first hour by upending the story’s emotional balance of power. Manipulation, however, is what we look for in good storytellers, and Kim appears to have gotten his serrated edge back.
75/100 ~ GOOD. As the couple reverse roles and their past injustices are slowly brought to the surface, Pieta puts you through a series of final twists that come with a huge payoff. The film changes direction, its central message suddenly painfully clear.
Related Posts
Review: Pieta (2012)
“The 18th film from Ki-duk Kim” proclaim the opening credits of Pieta, announcing auteurial authority with so booming a voice as to make entirely unsurprising the many ties that have been made betw...
Los Angeles Film Festival Review: Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013)
As much as it hurts to say it, Hong Sang-soo's latest film finds his stories of cloying relationships and sadomasochistic men-women foibles wearing thin. After the initial glow of re-encountering H...
Spotlight on Contemporary Korean Cinema: Kim Ki-duk, Subject: Arirang (2011)
In 2011, Kim Ki-duk returned to the world of film after a two-year hiatus by putting two new films on the international film festival circuit: his first ever documentary film Arirang and his sevent...
Director Profile: Ki-duk Kim
No one walks out of a Ki-duk Kim movie without being offended. Offense is a Kim trademark, and for many people, the fun stops there. At his weakest, the Korean auteur preys on our good taste for sh...
Review: American Mary (2012)
There’s ample opportunity, as much courtesy of the nature of the movie as of a line of dialogue, for Canadian twins and directorial duo Jen and Sylvia Soska to title their second feature Bloody Mar...
Alex is a recent University of Toronto graduate. He is studying Mandarin, going to film festivals, and prepping on his film lore like QT in the 80s. If you're in Beijing over the next few years and do film journalism, get in touch!
Latest posts by Alex Griffith (see all)
