The prolific Korean filmmaker Ki-duk Kim?s vicious, biting, and surprisingly elegiac new film, Pieta, follows the most unlikely of sympathetic characters, Gang-Do (Jeong-jin Lee), a pitiless hit man for a merciless loan shark. For much of the film?s first act, we are thrust into the nitty-gritty of his gruesome project. Gang-Do shows up at the tiny machine shops that populate a run-down and impoverished section of Seoul and tortures and mutilates the poor proprietors who can?t pay back their loans and the usurious interest that has been heaped upon them. The loan shark holds as collateral its client?s disability insurance policies, so when an ankle is crushed or a hand punctured by a heavy-duty metal fabricating machine, the boss man gets a check from the insurance company. All we get are the blood-splattered scenes Ki-duk Kim has orchestrated.
Pieta is a one-dimensional horror show (offering respite from the torture scenes only with shots of Gang-Do?s masterbating), that is, until the first of the film?s multiple sharp-edged twists drives the film into new territory. That first twist comes with the sudden arrival of Gang-Do?s mother, Mi-Son (Min-soo Jo). A peculiar kind of oedipal freak show ensues. Mi-Son stalks the loveless child, who is bitter about being abandoned at birth (the simple psychological redux is that the motherless child grows into a pitiless murderer, Psycho with reincarnation), but slowly warms to his mother?s efforts to rekindle a bond. Sentimentality has no place here, as made evident through one of Mi-Son?s gestures of love: a tightly-cropped shot of a slimy, squirming eel that is beheaded before mother cooks it for breakfast. (Ki-duk Kim has sparked controversy in the past for animal cruelty, and indeed there are rabbits, eels, and chickens (Herzog?) toyed with on screen.).Regardless, Gang-Do slowly softens in response to the unexpected encounter with a mother?s love. Suddenly somehow the murderer is in the street wearing a goofy balloon hat a street performer handed him while on a walk with mom. The torturer tries to relive his childhood.
If Pieta merely resolved itself in a narrative arc that brought killer to maladjusted child, it would feel rather paltry, but Ki-duk Kim is too clever a filmmaker for that. Instead a few subsequent twists and turns turn Pieta into a peculiar revenge story in which pity and sympathy, familial love, and a thirst for vengeance are wrapped in a bewildering web of interconnect desires. A strong subtext is the film?s implicit critique of Capitalism (?What is money, Gang-Do asks his mother. ?It is everything,? she tells him, framing all the action of the film within the shadow of a society dominated by a kind of amoral financial totalitarianism), as well as some connotative religious imagery and references. But the film?s ultimate impact is contained in the dynamic of a multitude of relationships between people brought together through violence and malice. And Pieta?s final scene, both grotesque and staggeringly beautiful, is one you won?t soon forget.
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