The third annual installment of TIM GRAY’s Ticket Stub Scrawlings featurette considers three from Ant Timpson’s “That’s Incredible Cinema!” potion: Lodge Kerrigan's volatile Keane, Park Chan-wook's revenge trilogy-capping Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and Kim Jee-woon's violent spectacle A Bittersweet Life. Let the Scrawlings begin.


KIA ORA and welcome to the Ticket Stub Scrawlings #3, an evisceration of the filthy underside of the TNZIFF programme contained in Ant Timpson’s “That’s Incredible Cinema!” showcase. This year, I tackle three more offerings from the programme, including the much anticipated finale in Park Chan-wook’s revenge cycle. Basically, the Scrawlings are not reviews, but rather gut reactions to three films dealing with loss, vindication and retribution. They make no attempt to offer a rounded or balanced view of the movies on offer, but rather provide a space for short rants on elements of the films that provoked a reaction, followed by some arbitrary figures to simplify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the films. It breaks down like this:


Basically how nicely the film was shot. A good Cinematography score could denote ‘original perspective’ (if pulled off well) or textbook stuff. The art of movie photography is so variable in terms of approach and quality; this just reflects how much I appreciated it. For lack of an editing category or anything like that, the number (out of 10) you see attests to the general cohesion of the images, and the sort of response they can provoke.


An integral part of any film, and quite possibly one most vital to a decent Non-Sequitur Mark out of 100. The quality of the acting will usually carry a movie, and I guess the criteria of this group are mostly self-explanatory. Obviously there are different styles of acting that could all garner hefty scores here… I’m not looking for dramatic thespian, glamorous melodrama or nihilistic post-modern delivery in particular. Nor does the acting have to be especially consistent. A film with one or two standout performances could easily bring a high mark, and one or two talentless actors won’t doom the score either.


Sound covers music, sound effects, and pretty much anything you can hear with your body’s ear (this category accepts no responsibility for the Voices In Your Head). To score highly here a huge musical score is not required, nor is a flurry of effects to bring you to aural orgasm. As long as these sounds are used to good effect and contribute to the overall impact of a film, a high mark here will not be a problem. Low marks however will go to movies that utilise music particularly inappropriately, or dish out the white noise indiscriminately (nope, not looking at anyone in particular... phew!)


The king of all marks and the standard by which movies are rated, the Non-Sequitur Mark out of 100 is in no way derived from any of the previous criteria, but simply represents my appreciation of any particular movie. This is not only because it’s problematic to average out 3 non-exhaustive categories of judgement, but also because the scrawlings are always going to be horribly subjective. These scores do not represent the views of the Lumière staff at large. Likewise, the Scrawlings might reveal some minor plot details, but nothing you won’t infer within 10 minutes of watching the film. Disclaim everything, and enjoy...




THINK BACK to the time as a youngster that you turned around from your latest distraction only to find your caregiver had disappeared. Recall those moments of dread, abandonment and separation anxiety. Parents may likewise have misplaced their tot in a public place for what seemed like hours, and remember hoping desperately that a stranger would come, leading their glassy-eyed child by the hand and back into their care and protection. This is the constant reality of our protagonist, William Keane, and for 90 minutes Keane will immerse you in this nightmarish vision, forcing its audience into the same deceptive emotional labyrinth as its hopelessly alienated principal.

Within a minute of the film’s opening, we form the distinct impression we’re watching a victim in the throes of a delusional mental illness as he shuffles uneasily on the spot, mutters constantly to himself, shouts at vehicles and heckles strangers with reckless desperation. However, as the film progresses we realise that we are stuck with a man gripped by something far more terrible and nameless, less distinct than a Hollywood case of schizophrenia.

And stuck with William we are. The vast majority of the film is spent within a couple of metres of him focused almost exclusively on his face, which is never far from self-loathing and complete meltdown. He wanders the desolate streets of New York purposefully, but with a paradoxical sense of aimlessness, and it is clear from early on that he will never find his daughter. This creates a sense of claustrophobia and also a corresponding sense of intimacy with William, and the more that we’re aware of his fragility, the more absolute our emotional involvement with him. This identification is so strong, that audiences will be caught between their desire to shout aloud at the cinema screen, begging William to moderate his behaviour, but at the same time feel tempted to look away from the cringe-inducing spectacle of his breakdowns in public places

The beauty of Keane comes from its stark naturalism, creating an uninterrupted visceral experience, where we must enter the mind of William and endure the hostility and alienation of urban living that weakens his soul. His is a world without music, cold and dissolute, played out to the sounds of car horns, ill-functioning jukeboxes, abuse and the shuffling of endless strangers. This authenticity sets Keane apart from classics like Taxi Driver or the allegorical contrivance of last year’s The Woodsman as it drowns us in a city teaming with people, yet completely dead.

Keane will not provide you with unambiguous redemption or catharsis, but it will provide one of the most involved, internal and suspense-filled 90 minutes of cinematic experience anywhere on offer, giving us insight into a sufferer of mental illness who’s not a math genius, nor a ‘seer’, but a volatile casualty of our individualistic society, gripped by loneliness, loss and alienation.





BUILT AROUND expressions of guilt, anguish and retribution, the films comprising Park Chan-wook’s revenge cycle have stuck with their audience like a pair of scissors in the head, and Park’s concluding entry, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, is no exception. Standing in the shadow of the Cannes Grand Prix winner, its forebear Old Boy, Lady Vengeance tries hard not to be dwarfed, and the result is a stylistically stunning, if far less thrilling, finale.

Park confesses to having conceived the entire plot over the course of a single cigarette, and this explains why it is narratively thinner than its predecessors. Lady Vengeance takes a bleaker tone, deliberately shedding the tragicomic humour of Mr Vengeance and the shocking excess of Old Boy. Focusing on the ‘kind-hearted’ Geum-Ja, a less-than-saintly convict who serves 13 years for a murder she did not commit, the bulk of the film is spent amassing intrigue as to just how the villain, school teacher Baek, will be disposed of, and whether our heroine can actually accomplish this.

Unfortunately by the end this feels, to some extent, like wasted effort, because we simply don’t care enough about our villain. Baek is a caricature of evil, exploiting women at his whim and killing children for his own sociopathic gratification. In fact, when the time for Geum-Ja’s ‘satisfaction’ inevitably comes, the moral dilemma facing our protagonist is too monotonous for us to really care. Where Park’s previous revenge films have charged their audiences with complicated moral decisions that truly involve us with our vengeful protagonists, we feel more like horrified on-lookers, bracing ourselves for an act of grotesque violence than we do a part of the film.

When the moment of satisfaction arrives, one can appreciate why Park has chosen a more settled, sombre trajectory for the film. Far from empty blood-letting, Lady Vengeance brings home something truly thematically satisfying, that revenge is a dead void, and that transgressions are often best left, forgotten if possible, a theme that has echoed throughout the revenge cycle, but never been so clearly stated until now.

The weighty subject matter of child-killing may seem a cheap path to emotional resonance or contrived in the wrong hands, yet Park’s deft eye for the theatrical, even Biblical, dress the film’s visual style with luscious imagery. Returning is Park’s trademark construction of space in strong geometric forms, where staircases become avenues to apotheosis and the constricting streets form hallways to hell. Likewise, Park reconfigures his stable of preferred actors who each turn on convincing performances, his recycling of actors from previous films providing the most overt circularity to the cycle. Notwithstanding this, Lee Young-Ae struggles to give emotional depth to her portrayal of Geum-Ja, and one suspects that to fully appreciate her performance requires an understanding of her star profile in Korea, as she departs from her sickly-sweet role established in TV melodrama. Propping up the theatrical performances is a hauntingly sad soundtrack from the composers of Old Boy, pregnant with the same Baroque unease and a touch of Vivaldi for good measure.

Ultimately, Lady Vengeance succeeds in rounding off Park’s revenge cycle on a high, if tonally bleak, note. Even if we don’t feel so deeply involved in Geum-Ja’s act of vengeance as we might have in the other films, Lady Vengeance gives us a square punch to the soul, and with it provides the strongest indictment of eye-for-eye revenge in the series, with all the finesse that audiences might expect from Park.





UNREQUITED love takes on a deep shade of red in this bitterly cold genre flick from Kim Jee-woon. Where his last festival favourite, A Tale of Two Sisters, produced shivers and suspense, the two hours of bone-crunching bloodshed that make up A Bittersweet Life may struggle for their audiences’ attention through stylistic excess and innumerable action sequences.

The film follows the fall of Sun-woo, gang enforcer and emotional iceman whose ruination begins when his interest is piqued by his boss’s girlfriend, Hee-soo, an adulterer and all-round cardboard cutout. What follows is betrayal after betrayal, soon enough heaving together into a tide of bloodshed. While this may sound formulaic, the performance by Byung-heon Lee as Sun-woo, the consummate badass, provides more than just sore knuckles and broken bones. Sun-woo’s physical ruin is preceded by a surprisingly compelling emotional meltdown, as the fearless thug who inflicts endless death throughout the film displays a moving vulnerability in his interaction with Hee-soo. This makes his eventual betrayal all the more painful, as the stoic enforcer who’d sooner finish his dessert than kick wiseguy ass transforms into a furious, desperate, killing machine, struggling for meaning to the sporadic rhythm of gunfire.

Refreshingly, Sun-woo is not the melodramatic, fiercely emotional antihero that viewers might expect from Korean cinema. In fact, his tortured psyche is only faintly suggested until the closing moments of the film. Rather than his naïve romantic aspirations, viewers will remember him as the badass who could take multiple stabbings, beatings, being buried alive and even a bullet to the head and go on fighting.

Unabashed fans of ultra-violent action cinema will find plenty to enjoy in Sun-woo’s bloody path to retribution. The latter half of the film sports gracefully staged hand-to-hand combat and carefully choreographed gunplay to rival any John Woo flick. All of this action is captured within the ominous interplay of dark and light, with frenetic editing helping to delay us from becoming numb to the seemingly endless death. Regardless of this, viewers will be excused for feeling like they’ve seen it all before.

While I’m loathe to make such comparisons, these are unavoidable given Kim’s fondness for referencing revenge cinema convention, which is overt enough to make Tarantino weak at the knees. Fans of classics like John Woo’s The Killer, Takeshi Kitano’s Violent Cop, any number of Tarantino films or indeed Old Boy will be caught by major spells of stylistic déjà vu, not just during the action sequences, but also through the choice of music and the decoration of spaces.

The film’s crowning glory is that it provides 100 novel ways to kill a stuntman, including Flaming Death by Righteous Burning 2x4 Plank and Having Your Face Dragged Against a Very Hot Concrete Wall (to Death), though this is to sorely overstate the film’s innovation. As one must accept, A Bittersweet Life is a genre film, and one can only hope it doesn’t signal the beginning of a tide of Korean revenge films in the same way that Ring signaled the onslaught of mediocre Japanese horror.