Blood Runs Cold

SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE

Directed by Chan-Wook Park

Film criticism thrives on outrage. South Korean writer-director Chan-Wook Park feeds that outrage by making stripped down, savage, eerily abstract pulp thrillers that invite knee-jerk condemnation from critics. They're the sorts of films one can pan, if one is feeling lazy, by lamenting the fact that distinctions between high and low art have disappeared (stop the presses!), then offering an uninflected laundry list of violent onscreen events and pretending that context (i.e., the moral and philosophical framework in which violence occurs) has no place in the discussion.

Park's extravagantly nasty Oldboy, which played New York earlier this year, inspired laundry lists aplenty. Park's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, which was written and shot before Oldboy, is sure to generate more of the same, even though it's a more controlled piece of work, arguably Park's best. It's about a deaf mute named Ryu (Ha-Kyun Shin) who kidnaps an industrialist's daughter to raise money for his terminally ill sister's transplant operation and punish the industrialist for firing him from a factory job. Without giving too much away, suffice to say that the industrialist, Park Dong-Jin (Son Kang-Ho, of Park's 2000 breakthrough Joint Security Area) cooperates at first, then seeks revenge against the kidnappers, leading to an escalating series of violent incidents. This is the kind of movie where things go from grim to grimmer to positively horrendous.

The lineup of atrocities includes an organ-removal scam that costs the hero a kidney, multiple deaths-by-bludgeoning, an electrical torture, a self-mutilation and several stabbings. There are no images as outrageous as the live octopus-eating scene in Oldboy (which didn't seem outrageous to South Koreans, only to Westerners). But Vengeance will never be mistaken for Broadcast News, and it's guaranteed to prompt the usual style-over-substance and exploitation-posing-as-art complaints.

In the end, all the grousing won't matter, because Park's movies are more sophisticated than his critics. On paper, his movies sound mindless. But if you pay attention to shots and cuts, Vengeance reveals itself as one of the most savagely intelligent movies of recent times-a film whose tricky melding of form and content succeeds where similarly stylized brutality fests (Sin City, for instance, or Tarantino's formally audacious but emotionally inept Kill Bill movies) stumbled. Unlike violence in a Tony Scott picture (or most Tarantino movies, or Scorsese's Cape Fear and Casino, or Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, or many of Takeshi Beat Kitano's yakuza thrillers), the violence in a Park film rarely seems to have been devised solely to shock audiences, provoke censors or achieve a savagely decorative effect.

With rare exceptions, Park's violence feels much more necessary, more emotionally real, than that. It's as horrific, cold and inevitable as the violence in a Bible story, a Brothers Grimm fairy tale or a Shakespeare tragedy (think Othello, Macbeth or the blinding in King Lear). Look at how the violence is presented (the compositions, the editing, the sound design) and you'll see that Park's attitude toward violence is anything but mindlessly gleeful. Instead, it ranges between anthropological curiosity (a la Bunuel and Kubrick) and helpless sadness (the best of De Palma). As such, it ranks with the most intellectually defensible ultraviolence in modern cinema.

Park's pet subject (a timeless one) is the evil that humans do to each other, and their elaborate, self-serving justifications for doing it. Park confounds audience conditioning (and trumps his detractors) by offering not a simply defined hero and villain, but rather, two exceptionally violent antagonists (in this case, the poor, marginalized Ryu and his rich boss) whose subjective belief in their own rightness is contradicted by the movie's omniscient view of their atrocities. Every person who commits violence in a Park film is convinced he's righteous, but the righteousness is arrived at through a tortuous series of rationalizations that collapse as the story unfolds and the bodies keep piling up (the Macbeth effect).

Ryu's girlfriend, Cha Yeong-Mi (Bae Doo-Na) an anti-capitalist agitator, justifies the abduction by insisting, "Movement of capital maximizes the value of money, so it's not even a crime," and "There are good kidnappings and bad kidnappings." In seeking the brute satisfactions of revenge, the industrialist lowers himself to the level of his tormentors. Neither antagonist ever really manages to step outside his passion and see himself as anything but the righteous, driven hero of his own personal epic. Park's characters are locked in their own fevered heads, ruled by desperation and grievance. But the filmmaker exercises his prerogative to step outside and adopt a more detached, dispassionate view of events. The tension between subjective and objective filmmaking techniques makes Vengeance darkly humorous. What's funny about Park's filmography isn't the violence itself, which is depicted as grotesquely childish and deeply traumatic, but our realization that the universe has no opinion on it.

Park conveys this perception gap by putting visual distance between the audience and the characters. He'll often let a violently emotional (or just plain violent) scene reach a fever pitch during a close-up, then cut to a medium shot from the same angle, then a wide shot, then an extreme wide shot. Look at the early scene where Ryu unleashes his pent-up anger in a batting cage (which progresses from tight close-ups to an extreme wide shot) or the bit where Ryu follows members of an illegal organ-harvesting gang up the diagonal staircase of an empty warehouse in silhouette (matted by blackness, the figures become tiny cutouts). Park's characters cannot (or will not) put things in perspective, so the movie does it for them. Their emotions are huge, but their place in the universe is no greater than anyone else's. Unlike most Hollywood movies, Park's films never vindicate violence by encouraging viewers to confuse a character's view of the world with the world itself.

Not all of the movie's violence feels justified, or even well judged. Ryu's revenge against the organ harvesters, complete with artery-spraying blood, is a mistake, I think, because the movie could have done without it, or perhaps with less of it. It's as big a mistake as Kubrick showing us the rival gang's rape in A Clockwork Orange before the film's first-person narrator arrives on the scene, or that popped eyeball in Casino-misjudgments that encouraged viewers to think the directors really were just getting off on violence while pretending to make a big statement about it. (A friend of mine dismisses Scorsese as "Schwarzenegger for intellectuals.")

But such missteps are a risk inherent to violent cinema, and Park steps wrong less often than you'd expect, considering his subject matter. Though compositionally and rhythmically very different, Vengeance's aloof, almost cosmically detached attitude toward violence recalls Terrence Malick's. Think, for instance, of the combat scenes in The Thin Red Line, which cut from close-up images of intense human suffering to inserts of animals and insects, reacting coolly or not at all, or the climax of Days of Heaven, which showed a beloved major character's bullet-riddled corpse floating in a river, then revealed a family of strangers observing the moment from the riverbank (one man's death is another's anecdote). A rough equivalent occurs midway through Vengeance, when an image of a screaming, hooded man lashed to a streetlamp in a vacant plaza (surely the worst moment of his life up to that point) cuts to a low-angled shot of insects dive-bombing the bulb and getting zapped to a crisp. As flies to wanton boys.

GREASER'S PALACE August 22, 7 p.m. at Two Boots Pioneer Theater

POUND August 19-25 at Anthology Film Archives

The inscrutable originality of Robert Downey, Sr. puts most so-called indies to shame. One of the few truly autonomous counterculture directors to make a dent in Vietnam-era consciousness (mainly with 1969's still-searing Madison Avenue takedown "Putney Swope"), Downey kept making counterculture satires into the 1970s and 1980s that were so bizarrely original ? so clearly the product of one artist's iconoclastic personality ? that they now seem like artifacts not from another time, but another dimension. Even his one kinda-sorta mainstream effort, the 1980 military school satire "Mad Magazine's Up the Academy," was so rude and rough ? so defiantly un-cuddly ? that it made "Animal House" seem like "The Shaggy D.A."

The HOWL! East Village Film Festival is screening two signature Downey works, 1970s "Pound" and 1973's "Greaser's Palace," both of which resist easy summary. The former is an adaptation of Downey's allegorical play set in a dog pound, with the canines portrayed by human actors. The ritualized behavior, rude slapstick and aggressively rhetorical dialogue feel Brechtian, while the tightly enclosed space (most of the story occurs within a holding cell) suggests "12 Angry Dogs." (Bald, wild-eyed Lawrence Wolf is a standout as a freaky-philosophical Mexican hairless, who claims to have witnessed the fall of Fulgencio Batista, and admonishes his fellow dogs, "We're all hanging on to each other like one piece of fear!")

The performances push right up to the edge of cartoonishness (and some leap into the abyss), and the comedy's insanely high pitch rattles the nerves after a while (which is the point, of course). But there's bittersweet, often touching wisdom amid the clowning. The male dogs' sexual competitiveness, the haphazard talk of a jailbreak and the canines' half-resentful, half-fawning interaction with their jailer is grimly amusing, but it's not just random silliness. Downey ties every dream and impulse to the pervasive fear of death, the number one topic of conversation inside and outside the pound (there's a sniper on the loose in New York). The movie's most-repeated line is, "You ready to die?" Movingly enough, the first pooch to supply an affirmative answer is a cute puppy portrayed by Downey's then young son, Robert Downey, Jr.

"Palace" is a surrealist, anachronism-packed western fable in which a zoot-suited healer named Jessy (Alan Arbus of TV's "M*A*S*H") parachutes onto the outskirts of a nasty frontier town ruled by saloon owner and gangster Seaweedhead Greaser (Albert Henderson) and clumsily tries to establish himself as a messiah even though a certain J.C. fellow has already made inroads. (Not that Jessy pursues his dream all that seriously; early on, he keeps telling people he's on his way to Jerusalem to be an actor-singer.)

Treating the landscape as an open-air stage, Downey presents dialogue, action and symbolism with blunt, cryptic, take-it-or-leave-it brazenness. The characters don't so much interact as shuffle amongst each other like cards in a tarot deck (they have names like Smiley, Cholera, Spitnuia and Captain Good) and there are hippie revisionist sight gags redolent of underground comics (including an image of a white man literally fucking a Native American). "Greaser's Palace" is even more scattered, random and willfully opaque than "Pound" (it's also astoundingly violent). But Downey finds room for startling lyrical interludes, including a gorgeous sequence following characters as they roam along a mountainous landscape tinted blue by magic-hour sunlight. Downey's juxtaposition of hippie slapstick, religious allegory, political satire and sheer physical beauty is by turns baffling and moving. If R. Crumb had directed an episode of "Gunsmoke," this is what it would have looked like.