Pieta
Director: Ki-duk Kim
Actors: Jeong-jin Lee, Ki-Hong Woo, Min-soo Jo
Release Date: Monday 30th November -0001
Genre(s): Drama
Running time: 104 minutes
A winner of the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, Pieta's interesting set up descends into farce.
The ruthless Gang-do (Jeong-jin Lee) leads a solitary existence as an enforcer for a loan shark. If the poverty-stricken borrowers can't repay in a timely fashion, Gang-do cripples them so they can claim on insurance, which he then takes to his boss. He doesn't take pleasure in the cruelty - it's just a job and he expresses as much emotion carrying it out as the machines those in debt toil at. When a woman (Min-soo Jo) appears and claims that she is his mother who abandoned him at birth, Gang-do is forced to rethink his vicious life.
Pieta is a grubby looking film. Director Ki-duk Kim (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... And Spring) chooses a cold time of year to set his story, and the location – a small, cramped area of a bleak city, with its tiny workshops of imposing machinery that leave no elbow room, are all designed to unsettle. He shoots scenes against backdrops of waste and garbage or in abandoned buildings. It's hell on earth. His handheld camera hammers home the uncomfortable atmosphere just in case you weren't already itchy.
Pieta's attempts to ramp up the tension render its story ridiculous, however. To prove that she is in fact his mother, Gang-do cuts a piece of skin from his leg (it could be his testicle – we never actually see) and asks her to eat it, which she does. But what does that prove? Later, when Gang-do has softened his attitude to his job, one debtor, in an unbelievable turnaround, begs him to mash both his hands in his machinery so he can provide for his baby. On top of that, the man is a guitarist, and he strums his instrument one last time before giving himself to the pain. Not a moment of it rings true, and it's from this scene that Pieta loses its energy.
Ki-duk Kim, in his first film since 2006, likes to throw all sorts of unpleasant things at the screen in Pieta, but to what end?
