Pieta Review
Pieta opens with a suicide that establishes the grim tone for the series of events that are to occur. Proudly boasting as the 18th film by Kim Ki-Duk, Pieta holds potential to be the most commercially appealing film Kim has made in the past few years. With that said, don’t believe for one second that Kim Ki-Duk has toned down his act. Pieta is just as transcending and confronting as anything else he has directed in his polarizing career.
Gang-Do (Cho Min-soo) is an insufferable cruel bastard who works as a loan shark collecting insurance debt. If you can’t pay the copious sums of money owed in the time allotted then Gang-Do will not hesitate in leaving you crippled. He is a representation of humanity at its lowest, or as his victims refer him – he is the human devil. He lives alone and has no friends or family. The only hint of kindness he shows is towards a pet rabbit.
His life takes a sudden detour when a mysterious woman shows up on his doorstep claiming to be his long lost mother (Lee Jung-Jin). He initially writes her off and slams the door in her face but she just keeps persisting on making contact with him. This gives way to an unbearably harsh first act as Gang-Do refuses to believe her claims.
Posted by Daniel Mann - 1/7/2013
He puts her through all sorts of rigorous torment. Culminating with a deeply unpleasant scene where he sexually molests her while simultaneously taunting her. Yet, despite this ungodly cruelty, she never wavers in her compassion and generosity towards him. Eventually, he accepts her as his mother. They grow a bond as she starts to bring out a shred of his humanity. He reverts from brutish inhumane thug to regaining a touch of long lost child hood innocence.
Then she disappears. Leaving him to believe that she has been kidnapped by one of the many people who bear him a grudge. This forces him to travel down a long path of past tormented victims as he searches for her. Forcing him to re-think his past methods of cruelty.
Pieta has two central motifs. First is the rather blatant disgust it has for dripping with wealth capitalism. The bulk of Gang-Do’s victims are the poor dishevelled working class cogs that make up a well-oiled lucrative industry. They are the desperate looking to support their under-privileged families by any means possible. In an act of cruelty, Gang-Do charges them ten times the borrowed sum in interest. Knowing full well that they won’t be able to pay up allowing him to indulge in what it is he does best. The character of Gang-Do is a metaphor for extreme capitalism at its worst.
The second motif being the religious overtone in asking the question – “Can God Extend the hand of forgiveness to the Human Devil?” In Christian art, Pieta is a subject depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus. As such, Director Kim uses this as the basis for his narrative. Gang-Do’s deeply discomforting nature is clearly the product of deep seeded abandonment issues.
His usual routine is to return home from work and indulge in a night of chronic masturbation. In his small apartment, he has a dartboard hanging above the kitchen table. Permanently pegged to the centre of the dartboard is a crudely rendered pastel drawing of a naked woman with a butcher knife stabbed right through the heart.
This latent misogynistic behaviour stems into a rather cathartic moment when the mother proceeds to give her sleeping son a hand job. It is a moment of pure transcendence. The scene is not focused on the sexual pleasure of the act rather it plays as a moment of the mother comforting her tormented son. It is suggested as a sort of divine intervention from an angelic presence.
Performances from both Cho Min-soo and Lee Jung-Jin are outstanding. Cho Min-soo is utterly convincing in the way his persona shifts from remorseless brutal thug to eventually revealing a shred of child like innocence. His transformation from inhumane to human is a believable one. Opposite to him is the equally strong performance given by Lee Jung-jin. Both play very well off one another and make for a strangely fascinating duo.
Shot on HD Video for a fraction of a normal budget, Director Kim fills his film with an assured use of handheld camera work. He makes good use of framing tight, confined areas giving the film an entrapped and claustrophobic atmosphere. Despite the low budget, the murky and gritty look of the film is rather appropriate to the subject matter giving way to some rather memorable imagery. Wisely, Director Kim also has the good taste to infer most of the films more obscene moments.
For as strong as the first hour is, the problems with Pieta pile up once it starts to reveal itself in the third act. With the disappearance of his mother, the narrative falls into the conventional trappings of a revenge flick. Some of those trappings are a little on the contrived side of the coin and are ultimately kind of hard to buy into. The first two acts are so sublime in the exploration of the motifs. To watch it fall into conventional methods with its final act is slightly disappointing. Thankfully, Director Kim doesn’t let the motifs fall by the way side as they play heavily into the denouement of the film.
Discomforting as the subject matter is, there is a strange abundance of beauty to be had in its ugliness. There is a brilliant line of dialog spoken by the mother that opens up the third act. She denounces the value of money as being the “beginning and end of all things”. That singular line of dialog sums up the emphasis of the film best. Forcing one to rethink about the value of money and its effect on the capacity to love and embrace. The film is not just an embrace to its corrupted central character; it’s an embrace to humanity as a whole.
☆☆☆½
MORE REVIEWS
