Pietà
Yes, I know, I have 10 movies in my backlog. I am recently taking the opportunity of some downtime to watch a lot of films, but it’s impossible to keep up blogging them at the same rate. I just finished watching “Pietà” with Pixelmatsch who requested an immediate posting. So here we are.
The truth is that I am a little afraid of Kim Ki-duk’s films. I only saw “Bin-jip” and “Time”, both of which aren’t as disturbing as some of the other films he’s famous for. As far as I know, “Spring, Summer etc.” is also not as disturbing, but that’s probably it. I have never seen “Samaria” for that reason and I wonder if I ever will. Somehow I was very curious about “Pietà”, mainly because it is considered the result of Kim Ki-duk’s creativity crisis. As someone who faces writer’s block all the time, I was intrigued.
Indeed, “Pietà” is about as disturbing as you can get. I had to look away so many times that I am not even sure I watched the film. Some aspects don’t even make much sense (like the guy with the baby and the guitar) and the end is a little nonlinear (or so it seemed?) and honestly I don’t quite understand why he regained his humanity towards these people he hurt. A lot of brutal, sick people are able to commit the worst crimes towards strangers while loving their own families. But in this film that aspect is completely ignored, but I guess one must be asian to bring this up. Pietà, a film clearly made for the foreign audience, totally adheres to the rules of Korean cinema – shiny cinematography, lots of gore and a revenge plot.
In terms of storytelling, direction and all, the film is just as brilliant as one would expect. I have never really been into the goriness or even the revenge part (truth to be told, I rather dislike it) but these Korean movies always come in such a great package – good actors, gripping stories and a great cinematography – that I want to watch every one of them. “Pietà” is no different there; there are so many details that just work, the way the characters interact with each other may not always be believable if you think about it, but the way the film shows it makes it feel believable.
This truly is an unwatchable movie, almost as bad as “Nordwand”, but if you can stomach that, this is really good.