MPAA Rating: Not Rated
Director: Ki-duk Kim
Film Pulse Score: 5/10
Ki-duk Kim’s newest film Pieta won the Golden Lion (Il Leone d’Oro) prize at the 69th Venice International Film Festival…on a technicality. Which, of course, caused a bit of controversy because of a new by-law (originally P.T. Anderson’s The Master was to win) and rightly so, but let’s move past that and discuss the film itself and whether or not it should have won the Golden Lion. I’m going to save you the long-winded embellished explanation and say NO.
Pieta centers on loan shark enforcer Gang-Do (Jeong-jin Lee) and his ruthless tactics and eventual redemption…kind of. Gang-Do is tasked with creating cripples out of irresponsible borrowers in Gheonggyecheon, the urban renewal project in Seoul, South Korea. Gang-Do is brutal. Early on the viewer gets a glimpse into Gang-Do’s mercilessness and abject savageness, whether it be crushing a man’s arm in a lathe machine or anything else, showing Gang-Do is devoid of feeling.
That is until his long-lost mother, Mi-Son (Min-soo Jo), shows up following Gang-Do, waddling, for what seems like an eternity. Kim seems to spend entirely too much time building-up the unveil that Mi-Son, is indeed, Gang-Do’s mother. Showing up unexpectedly to clean house, following incessantly, buying an eel and patiently waiting outside of Gang-Do’s apartment until Gang-Do finally accepts Mi-Son as his mother, and finally gets the story moving. Quickly, Gang-Do devolves into a sort-of childlike wonder in the midst of his new found mother (balloon animals and all) and begins to soften towards his trade, dispensing mercy left and right to irresponsible borrowers, though the old Gang-Do would have happily annihilated limbs to gain a twisted sense of fulfillment from his profession.
The fact that Pieta won The Golden Lion and was directed by one of South Korea’s foremost directors lends this film a great deal of promise. However, sadly, it did not deliver, coming off, instead, as a bit of an insincere side project of Ki-duk Kim’s, if you will. The acting in Pieta was superb – Min-soo Jo (here, making her first film appearance) was incredible – a joy to watch as she acted her way through a range of emotions and experiences. Unfortunately, the performances alone were not enough to save this film, which, again, came with great potential, but delivered a half-hearted and far too typical revenge film.
The plot was meandering, and it seemed as though Ki-duk Kim couldn’t decide whether he wanted to make a revenge thriller, a city symphony, a redemption-themed drama, or even a documentary in some places. The camerawork, too, was off, distancing the viewer from the film’s finer moments by its extreme self-awareness. Shots that would have been better suited, perhaps, to a documentary leave the viewer with an unsettling detachment, reminding the viewer constantly that they are watching a film, but never working to draw the audience into its world. The first hour or so of Pieta laboriously builds up to an unsatisfying dénouement. While the ending was powerful and even, in some ways, satisfying, it was also unquestionably predictable, making all of the film’s preceding actions seem needlessly arduous.
