(South Korea, 104 min.)
Written and directed by Kim Ki-duk
Starring: Cho Min-soo, Lee Jung-jin.
The press notes for Kim Ki-duk’s Pieta begin with the following note, which appears on a page unto
itself thus stressing its overall significance in the grand scheme of the film:
‘Pieta’, meaning ‘pity’ in Italian, is an artistic style of a sculpture or painting that depicts the Virgin Mary sorrowfully cradling the dead body of Jesus. The Virgin Mary’s emotions revealed in ‘Pieta’ have represented the countless pains of loss that humans experience in life that are universally identifiable throughout centuries. It has been revived through master artists such as Michelangelo and Van Gogh.
This little blurb adds an extra spot of disappointment to Pieta, for it implies that the film truly did aspire to higher meaning. Pieta doesn’t really say anything, although Kim uses the motif of loss, especially between mothers and sons, to create a bleak portrait of the human experience. Kim Ki-duk certainly isn’t Michelangelo or Van Gogh, though, despite whatever the tastemakers at prestigious international film festivals might tell you.
Pieta landed on
the film circuit last year amidst a swarm of controversy. It premiered at the
Venice Film Festival, where it received generally favourable reviews, but
brought no sort of excitement to match some of the fest’s more popular pics. Pieta was then crowned best of the fest
after a contentious awards jury passed over Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and gave it the Golden Lion
instead. Venice, like Cannes, rules that a film cannot be awarded the Best Film
prize if it’s receiving another top prize from the jury, and The Master was already tipped to win
Best director for Anderson and Best Actor honours for Joaquin Phoenix and
Philip Seymour Hoffman. (The same rule at Cannes prompted the jury to make the
better decision of awarding the Palme d’or to both the director and to the stars of Blue is the Warmest Color, rather than
have only one or the other get a decent shout-out.) Critics cried foul, Pieta was deemed unworthy, and Venice
looked so silly that it might as well have given the Golden Lion to Brian
DePalma’s Passion.
Pieta therefore
enters its theatrical release without a snowball’s chance in hell for finding a
decent reception. Pieta has the
misfortune of finding itself in a double jeopardy of expectations, for it
brings the high standards that come with the endorsement of a major film
festival win, as well as the novelty of a resounding backlash that it was
wholly undeserving of the prize. One then goes into Pieta hoping to see either a masterpiece or an indefensible piece
of trash.
The disappointment is that Pieta is neither. It's not good enough or original enough to merit
the top prize from a festival on the calibre of Venice (or from any festival,
for that matter), but it's not bad enough to warrant an all-out pan, either. Pieta is just a run-of-the mill revenge
thriller with an icky Oedipal vibe and a penchant for shock value. Everything
it offers has been done before in better films, and the much ballyhooed sex and
violence isn't graphic or depraved enough to induce vomiting or applause from
audience members expecting to lose their lunches.
Most of the naughty bits actually occur outside the frame. Kim favours off-screen violence leaves the audience with gross sounds and painful reaction shots. Pieta is essentially a timid film for the expectation of Asian extremism connoted by many of the negative reviews, although the scene in which the son forces his mother to eat a piece of his flesh and then proceeds to rape her is in a league of its own for cringe-inducing tastelessness.
The mother-son cannibalism is the most gruelling depiction
of sacrifice and loss in Pieta, but
it’s a misfire of Biblical proportions if Kim aspired to the lofty classical
artistry referred to in cultural tidbit mentioned above. The story of the
mysterious woman, played by Cho Min-soo, who calls upon her moneylender son,
played by Lee Jung-jin, has the added resonance only if one reads up on the
film after seeing it. (Pieta is the
kind of film that probably benefits greatly from a post-screening Q&A.) The
actual storyline of Pieta, if one can
call the nonsensical string of call-and-response vendettas a story at all, is
rather flat and hollow. It’s shallow miserablism for its own sake.
Pieta has a tangy
air of ambiguity, though, for Kim’s atmosphere often has a sense of impending
doom. It could be the feeling that the plot seems to meander or that the
production looks as if it was shot in a haphazard moment of passion and then
hacked in the editing room with a machete. On the other hand, the murky
atmosphere of Pieta evokes the sense
that the drama plays out in a crypt, rather than the slums of the
Cheonggyecheon area of Seoul, so some inkling of Pieta’s Biblical aspirations could be found in a careful analysis
of the setting as a contemporary cesspool of poverty and suffering.
Cho, meanwhile, is a revelation as the mysterious mother,
who often masks her sinister motivation behind a single tear. The power of the
performance, though, is often suffocated by Lee’s flat screen presence, plus
the overall vapidity of Kim’s disjointed production, so it’s hard to believe
the symbolism behind the film’s schizophrenia. Pieta reads like a film that was branded with a thesis that was
conceived in post-production and held sway through the power of auteurism. As
an overall film experience, however, Pieta
amounts to little more than self-indulgent necrophilia.
Rating: ★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Pieta is currently playing in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox.