52 Pick-Up # 23 – I Saw the Devil (2010)

Welcome back to 52 Pick-Up!

Wow, that felt like a weirdly enthusiastic way to start an entry for both a pretty grim movie as well as the third and final part in what has accidentally become a fun Bleak Week cycle here.

For anyone somehow just checking in, this is my year spanning project to keep myself writing and expanding my cinematic horizons with 52 movies I've never seen before. Some on my to do list, some tagged in by my wife who has been a good sport in this endeavor.

With this entry, I'm coming to the end of what has inadvertently become a fun, strange mini-cycle in this project. By sheer happy accident, the past few movies turned into a trifecta built around the art house theater custom known as Bleak Week, a week in which indie cinemas specialize in varying incredibly dark movies. That the week itself – sandwiched between this week's movie and Incendies – went to Sex and the City, wound up being amusing to me. That even before the writeup turned into a meditation on the movie as a snapshot of the last hurrah before the financial bubble burst.

So where do we go after war crimes and financial collapse? How about blood-soaked vengeance that no one walks away from happily?

To those of you who said 'Yes'? Good, cause we're going there anyway.

With that as our set-up (and I suppose VERY vague spoiler), let's get into the pitch.

Kim Jee-Woon's I Saw the Devil introduces us to two men: serial killer Jang Kyung-Chul (Choi Min-Sik, returning to the revenge genre from his earlier iconic work in Oldboy) and intelligence agent Kim Soo-Hyun (Lee Byung-Hun.) The movie starts as Kyung-Chul has killed his latest victim – Soo-Hyun's fiancée. Soo-Hyun, determined to avenge her death, first starts by wreaking terror on multiple suspects before finding Kyung-Chul. With his target located, Soo-Hyun isn't interested in bringing Kyung-Chul in alive, but rather has decided he will make the man suffer as he has. What follows is a violent, cold-blooded game of cat and mouse between the two men, first as we see how far from the path of law and order Soo-Hyun will stray in his desire for revenge, and then what Kyung-Chul is will to do to return to favor.

Again, gotta love how this trio sorted out. Right down to ending with the grimmest of the three.

And honestly? I really liked that it went that way.

I know, I know, it feels weird to apply 'liked' to a movie that is a fairly brutal, violent entry into the 'vengeance as a double-edged sword' subgenre. I swear, this isn't out of some weird sadism at the violent acts committed – in fact, there were a few times I was actually surprised to see the movie not pull a punch. In this case it came down to two things. The first – this is just a genuinely well-made, tense thriller further enhanced by two top notch performers in Min-Sik and Byung-Hun. The second is how hard this goes into that double-edged aspect of the vengeance. 

Additionally, coming into this with my last time seeing
Lee Byung-Hun being the dark comedy No Other Choice,
this gives me a whole other level of respect for his range.

It's not a universally set rule, but it's not an uncommon occurrence in these kinds of stories where that sort of blow back comes in the idea of the protagonist simply resorting to more monstrous means than those they are against to settle the score. It's even present in this to a degree, particularly early on as it becomes clear that Soo-Hyun isn't satisfied with simply seeing his fiancée's killer arrested or killed. Where this movie steps it up for me comes with the fact that the movie remembers the man Soo-Hyun is pursuing to this degree is still a violent, dangerous psychopath. Once Kyang-Chul starts to key in to what's happening, he starts pushing back. Instead of this simply being one man going too hard to destroy another, it becomes murderous one-upping. What started as Soo-Hyun determined to torture the source of his misery to death turns into him realizing he let a monster live too long, and realizing he can still lose more at this man's hands, turning into a race to see which man can destroy the other first.

It is bleak. It is cold-blooded. It is mean-spirited. And dammit, it worked on me.

It still feels genuinely weird to say that incredibly bleak tone is what I enjoyed about this movie, but there's no other way to put. There is just something about the grim balance that this movie hits that really resonated for me and I'm glad I finally got to watching it.

I'm also glad this was the movie of the three to close out this accidental Bleak Week cycle, going out on the darkest, and most final of the three movies.

So, for anyone who's been reading these and going 'Jesus Christ, could you lighten up a little?' lately – I've got good news!

Sort of. Depending your tastes.

There will be a tonal palate cleanser on deck next time as I make my penultimate foray into Open Waters. Next entry, I'm coming near the end with (to date, fingers crossed) John Waters's final directorial outing, 2004's A Dirty Shame.

Till next time!

52 Pick-Up # 21 – Incendies (2010)

Ah, the end of May. It's getting warmer out, plants are in bloom and critters are all out and about.

And over here, 52 Pick Up is...
Oh.

Oof.

I mean, this was good, but oof.

Welcome back to 52 Pick-Up, my year long documentation of going through 52 first time watches of movies that have been in some degree of my to do list.

As as I come in to the tail end of the fifth month of this project, it's been an interesting grab bag. Especially this past month, going from the wonderfully weird world of John Waters, to a Coen Bros screwball comedy, and last week's audaciously insane Wild Zero. It's been a fun romp of a month.

That I will now be closing out in a fairly bleak fashion, courtesy of Denis Villeneuve's Incendies.

I'm going to apologize up front – this is a movie where I'm going to be trying to avoid getting too into the details, as functionally this movie is as much a mystery as it is a character piece and a tragedy. It won't ruin the movie if you know some of the details, but it does help keep the momentum on that first watch.

One more note while we're being up front – while this is one to go into without knowing too much, I will give a courtesy warning. This movie touches on some heavy themes, in particular war crimes and sexual assault (neither is presented in an especially lurid light, but still, they are there and the movie isn't ambiguous about it.) I'm saying this here because these are things that it feels, if I may be blunt, dickish to blindside someone with. It's still worth seeing if you think you can handle that, and letting the story unfold on its own, but if that's a hard pass, no judgments if you sit this one out.

And with that disclaimer...

Like I said above, Incendies is, alongside being a character piece, presented as a mystery. The movie begins following the death of Nawal (Lubna Azabal), a woman from an unnamed Levantine country (the movie, and the play it's adapted from, were inspired by the Lebanese Civil War and one particular prisoner from that war, Souha Bechara.) We're introduced to her twin children, Jeanne and Simon (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette) who have been informed their mother has left instructions that she is not to be given a proper grave until they deliver two letters – one to their father they have believed dead, the other to a brother they had no idea existed. While Simon is initially put off by the whole endeavor, Jeanne sets to work trying to find the identities of these people. Her efforts lead her to dig into her mother's past as she does so. The viewer then follows Jeanne, and later Simon, as they inquire further, learning of the secrets and tragedies that their mother went through before they were born.

That's about as far as I can take it without getting into spoilers, humor me.

The instinct to try and avoid spoilers has, I admit, made this another movie where finding a particular aspect to discuss has been a challenge. Especially as that mystery, and the momentum it gives this, is a big part of what drew me in in the first place.

Which is interesting for me as, in reading up on this, much of the mystery is unique to the movie version.

As I said above, this movie is an adaptation. In this case taken from the play of the same name by Wajdi Mouawad. Curious, I decided to look into this – particularly since, as film adaptations of plays go, this is one that it somewhat surprised to me learn was a play. I can see elements that would play on stage, but the execution feels very much designed for film in this case, particularly compared with some other attempts to transplant a play to film (Aronofsky's The Whale comes to mind, a movie that it isn't at all shocking to learn is based on a play, as the trappings feel very bound by the 'single set stage' aspects of the material.) Reading up on comparisons between Mouawad's play and Villeneuve's movie added to my interest from both sides of this particular translation. While Villeneuve keeps much of the core story, he also makes some very striking changes to accommodate the medium (one particular reveal that Mouawad appears to set up early, Villeneuve holds till the end, making for a genuinely shocking drop when it comes.) Adding to the changes in structure, there are also extensive revisions to the dialogue, with whole scenes being rewritten, either for dialogue, structure, or both.

Maybe it's the fact that I was taking part in a general discussion on adaptation in film earlier this month that has this prominent in my brain, but I am struck by the choices made in this particular version and how they measure up to what I'm seeing about the original. In particular, and with that discussion in mind, looking at this in the question of 'which is better?'

Without having seen the original play (though I must admit I now want to), the sense I get in the comparison isn't so much that one is better than the other as much as each is better for its particular medium. A number of the changes Villeneuve has made feel specifically like they were done specifically to play to the medium of film and the freedoms and limitations that allows for. Things like the fact he has a broader visual canvas to play with (which is at times used to haunting effect in this) but in turn, he is beholden to a more rigid structuring, even as the movie finds its own ways to explore the narrative shifting between the past and the present. There are elements and lines Mouawad has that I can see working incredibly effectively on a stage that would feel forced or clunky in a movie, just as there's things Villeneuve does here that a stage performance would be hard pressed to capture.

Despite those differences, the movie ultimately reaches the same core that the stage play is reaching for – two siblings discovering the horrific past their mother tried to keep buried in life, only discovering it after her death when they are tasked to help her say the things she couldn't at the time. I can see why this was the movie that really put Villeneuve on the map, both for how it translated its source material as well as helping highlight a lot of the skills that would define many of his subsequent movies.

I'm glad I watched this one and I can tell I'll be thinking of it for a long while after this.

Which is probably for the best, as it may be a good long time before I feel like I'm game to revisit it.

On that happy note, it is time to bid adieu to May and get ready to kick off June as the halfway point is fast approaching.

And just how am I kicking off the informal start of summer?

After pulling June's shuffle, my wife has decided to invoke her veto power, in a move that she has since confirmed was chosen to try and test my specific limits of 'this just isn't for me.'

I have to admit, she brought the big guns with Sex and the City – The Movie. But, that's a discussion for another week.

So, until then!