Pietà

Summary: 10/10: a scalding, nearly unwatchable masterpiece that turns Michelangelo's art into an indictment of usury and late-stage capitalism, and proves that the most unbearable violence in cinema is the violence a director refuses to show you.

"The pine tree that once stood here / Was cut down and disappeared." — Daldongnae: A Slum Under the Moonlight, NHK World documentary

Kim Ki-duk is Korea's most admired filmmaker and one of my great personal favorites, and the reason is his creativity, which never once in his career depended on a budget. He is the undisputed master of "show, don't tell." Consider 3-Iron, in which the leading man never speaks a word and it takes you half the film to notice, because Kim has already told you everything through a golf club, a bathroom scale, a shirt washed by hand in a stranger's sink. I expect young filmmakers will be studying him for the next century because what he does looks simple and is not.

After Dream in 2008, when his lead actress nearly died on set during a scene, Kim disappeared for three years into a shack and a private existential crisis. Pietà is his first real narrative feature film since that unfortunate event. That such a silence produced Pietà is not a comeback; it is a verdict.

Has he lost his spirituality? the serenity of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring? Not for a moment. He has only changed testaments.

The title points first to Michelangelo's work of the same name, and to the whole tradition of the Virgin cradling her broken son, an image so absorbed into Christian culture that we no longer consider its significance. And there is a mother in this movie too, played by Cho Min-soo in a performance of genuine ferocity, and there is a dead son she must carry and bury beneath a pine tree; the sculpture assembles itself in front of you, as action in the film instead of marble. The Italian title word means pity, and also piety, and Gang-do (Lee Jung-jin) do...