Director: Kim Ki-duk
Talent: Lee Jung-jin, Jo Min-su, Kang Eun-jin, Woo Gi-hong
Release Date: 13th August 2013
Kim Ki-duk’s 18th feature film won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival on a technicality, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master unable to sweep the boards despite accumulating the most thumbs-ups from Michael Mann’s jury. Here, the director of 2004’s acclaimed 3-Iron presents us with the tale of a brutal debt collector, Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin), forced to reconsider his violent ways when a woman claiming to be his long-lost mother, Mi-sun (Jo Min-su), turns up on his doorstep. Dealing seemingly exclusively with cash-strapped light-machine-tool operators in the industrial city of Chenggyecheon, Kang-do collects debts on which interest accumulates by as much as one hundred per cent on a month-to-month basis, with his preferred method being to seriously injure the debtors and taking their resultant insurance payments. Pietà‘s first half is devoted to the cruelty he inflicts on these people, maiming them using their own machines and seeming to take pleasure in doing so. The arrival of Mi-sun prompts in him disbelief, anger, violence (both physical and sexual — Kim’s films tend to be graphic and this is no exception) before acceptance and, it seems, a certain recalcitrance. The film’s Oedipal concerns, laid out in uncomfortable, broad terms, inform its second half, in which Kang-do tries with great difficulty to extricate himself from his former life for his mother’s sake.
This change in tone is ill-advised: the film’s high-point comes when Kang-do calls to collect a debt from an elderly man who confesses that he never had any intention of paying back the money he borrowed, that he wanted to spend it and enjoy himself before killing himself, to leave a life which, for him, no longer holds any worth. He decries the exploitation of ordinary people by factories that provide less and less work for less pay, and the eventual inevitability of workers’ redundancy. ‘What is money?’ he asks. ‘What is death?’
At this point, as the man ascends a fire escape to plummet willingly to his death, Kim cuts to jarringly-lit footage of machinery being operated: lathes, table saws, etc. that would not be out of place in a cheap documentary about factory production. By now, we have grown so accustomed to seeing Kang-do turn such machinery on its operators that we can think of little else. Kim cuts again to a wide shot of the skyline of Chenggyecheon, looking every inch the steaming industrial metropolis of our collective dystopic nightmares. The stark realism of his non-diegetic footage of production lines hints at a film not just about a fantastically cruel debt collector, but about alienation and exploitation, by the systemic cruelty of the capitalist mode of production, of debt itself.
So when, in its final throes, Pietà concerns itself more with the resolution of a rather more circular, individual story, there is a palpable sense of an opportunity having been missed. Kim shows us Kang-do’s unscrupulous, abusive employer in all his banal grotesquerie, only to (at least partially) exonerate him from his subordinate’s greater excesses as he denounces him a butcher, seemingly having been entirely ignorant of his insurance claim collection tactic: something which stretches credulity somewhat. But don’t worry: he gets his comeuppance, along with everyone else, for what it’s worth. It seems a shame that Kim’s storytelling is more concerned with making all the individual pieces fit neatly than examining the wider forces that act on them. As all the film’s loose ends are tied up, with something approaching a definitive ending (if not a happy one), we are left to consider again the final words of the old man who earlier died by suicide: even if the film is itself a closed system, the conditions represented within it are such that they reproduce themselves ad infinitum, that by outliving death, empty it of meaning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7txdX3lZhg8
