Outrage Comedy and Unholy Tragedy

The authentically disgusting "Taxidermia" and Park Chan-wook's "Vengeance" trilogy hit DVD.

And then there’s the unholy tragedy of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy, re-unleashed as a supplement-cluttered box set by Tartan Palisades, not long after Park’s “Thirst” made something less of a splash last year than it certainly should’ve. Bong Joon-ho and Hong Sang-soo may be reaping the critics’ accolades, but Park put the movement on the mass-audience map, winning a Tarantino-connived top prize at Cannes for “Oldboy,” and rejuvenating for us in the mid-2000s what serious imported movies can be like — here, finally, was a foreign cinema that is neither Miramax-homogeneous nor benumbed by desolate art-film torpor, but instead feverish with fury and regret, and as epic as Greek tragedy.

“Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” (2002) may still be Park’s best film, a soberly-judged cascade that’s as much Euripdes as it is James M. Cain in spirit, but with a touch of Wile E. Coyote narrative circularity to convince us of karma’s inescapable payload. “Oldboy” (2003) raises the stakes considerably, away from reality but toward a Sadean construction of suffering and vengeance, and the result is a pulp movie that thinks in cosmic terms. Its pure sensational-ness was both an intravenous high and a turn-off for a lot of critics, and any wide-awake filmgoer could suss out which reviewers he or she will find worth reading in the future by how they all agreed or disagreed about this one film. But there’s no doubting its octane or its ambition, and even if Park, by this point, didn’t seem like your cup of soju, you have to appreciate the juice he brings to Asian cinema, genre films and pop movies in general.

“Lady Vengeance” (2005) is the sullen and patient trilogy capper, and yet it is breathless pop filmmaking, narratively mercurial, viscerally traumatic and thematically infernal. Here, the appetite for destruction falls to a framed murderess enacting a monstrous revenge plot upon her release, but nothing in Park’s film is as simple as that, and seemingly righteous actions always come strapped to their own dynamite-bundles of unintended consequences. In Park’s realm (always co-written with others, by the way, but written with a suspension bridge’s architectural wisdom), violence is a personalized toxifying plume that spreads from perp to victim to survivor and avenging angel.

The Tartan box comes with five extra discs of interviews, deleted scenes, docs, video diaries, essays, director and critic commentaries, an alternate version of “Lady Vengeance” in which the film gradually loses its color as it proceeds, and tons more. The movies, already too conveniently dismissed in the discourse, it seems, deserve it.

“Taxidermia” (E1 Entertainment Distribution) will be available on DVD April 6th; the “Vengeance” Trilogy (Vivendi Entertainment) is now available on DVD.

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