Three Koreans Walk Into a Film Festival...

Crowned "the new Hong Kong" by some (but more like the next New Wave), the mushrooming South Korean film market has been the exotic flavor of the fest this year, represented in a triple feature of meritorious works. The choicest cut and most deliberately contentious of the bunch, Im Sang-Soo's The President's Last Bang hangs its titular double-entendre on a smirk to recreate (and fill in the many obfuscated what-if's concerning) KCIA director Kim Jae-gyu's 1979 assassination of President Park, a controversial authoritarian who helped empower the country at the atrocious expense of civil liberties. Crafted as a deadpan political satire in a shade morbidly darker than Dr. Strangelove, Im's evocative stunner offers astute attention to detail, from the near-dictator's obsession with Japanese culture to the goings-on at his taxpayer-funded pleasure palace, Blue House. Now imagine the same film made about a U.S. President (let's not get into that "civil liberties" part), and you'll understand the controversy raised in its native country, where the Seoul Central Court forced Im to remove four minutes of bookended documentary footage depicting anti-government protests and Park's funeral. (Their dubious reasoning? Viewers might get confused to whether the film were fact or fiction.) Still, The President's Last Bang survives as a mind-blowing study in the impulsivity of the powerful, shot with meticulously fluid camerawork that recalls peak-era Scorsese and featuring a hilariously rich performance by Baek Yoon-shik as triggerman Kim.

From a history of violence to a flashy moral fable of such, technical magician Park Chan-wook requests Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, especially from sour critics eager to write off this long-anticipated denouement to his revenge trilogy as exploitation. Unlike the first two films in his cycle—which focused on the politics and unending circuit of score-settling (the harrowingly forceful Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), and subversively humanizing film-noir fantasies (the squid-munching Cannes winner Oldboy)—Park's elegant new melodrama employs retribution as a form of religious rebirth and atonement, a thesis cautiously proven to be messy and ultimately futile. Beginning after her dozen-plus years in the slammer for the kidnapping and murder of a little boy, angelic Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) is released on her rehabilitated scruples, but that good-girl image is all a carefully-plotted act to exact retribution upon the man responsible for her sham imprisonment, Mr. Baek (Oldboy himself, Choi Min-sik). Less graphic than the first two pictures but nonetheless disquieting, Lady Vengeance (as it may be retitled for its 2006 theatrical release) raises meaty questions about vigilantism—unlike Tarantino's similarly plotted and pop-styled Kill Bill—though its surface showiness makes it harder to hold audiences complicit for their movie-carnage exhilaration as David Cronenberg's latest so subtly does.

Woman is the Future of Man auteur Hong Sang-soo returns from last year's NYFF with his experimental relationship dramedy Tale of Cinema. Emotionally honest in its late-bloomer humility, Hong's wonderful sixth feature is a love-story diptych whose two halves reflect and refract upon one another through the all-seeing eye of film itself. In the first story, an aimlessly infantile young man named Sang-won (Lee Ki-woo) crosses paths with his former crush, Yong-sil (Uhm Ji-won), and somehow agrees to a mutual hotel-room suicide pact. The second segment begins with wishy-washy and downright socially retarded filmmaker Tong-su (Kim Sang-kyung) as he leaves a movie theater, and soonafter bumps into the attractive actress from the film he just watched (also Uhm Ji-won, this time a decade older). They begin a rapport and discover they have an ailing friend in common, but Tong-su's continually embarrassing demeanor cracks an anxious rift between them. Each segment shrewdly rhymes the other's imagery and from-Venus-or-Mars dynamics—especially along its themes of sex and deflated male ego—yet Hong's innovations are multi-layered enough to be safely interpreted through many strains of viewer subjectivity. This critic personally found his innumerable, intentionally awkward zooms (as Hong isn't sloppy with his camera) to be a meta-reminder of our voyeuristic position as an audience; a film within a film within our own personal film, as it were. Whoever's film it is, Tale of Cinema urgently needs a U.S. distributor, as does this underrated director's entire back catalog.

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