김기덕: 피에타
Pieta:
A Masterpiece on a Drawing Board?
This post is not so much a formal review as it is a reflection on my immediate impressions—and as such, it contains SPOILERS.
I knew watching this film wouldn’t be easy. While no work by Kim Ki-duk can be described as simple entertainment, the title itself suggested a particularly heavy theme, and the swirling news left no doubt that we were in for a grueling cinematic experience.
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| Director Kim Ki-duk |
I once heard a foreign film scholar say that the level of immorality in Bad Guy affected them so deeply that they couldn't watch another Kim Ki-duk film for years. Another critic suggested that the director has a penchant for kitsch. Both thoughts have occupied my mind for a long time, and I haven't yet found a comforting answer within myself.
Usually, I am not bothered by the pushing of extremes, especially when it serves the exploration of our human nature. Regarding Kim’s films, I have long held the view that the plot is merely a loose framework for posing a fundamental question—and we shouldn't hope for much if we aren't satisfied by the pleasure of unraveling a twisted parable.
Yet, Pieta felt different from his previous works. It stirred ambivalent feelings in me even while watching. I noticed that I wasn't swept away by the "magic of cinema"; instead, I watched the film as if observing a vivisection through a glass wall. Or rather, as if witnessing the birth of a hellish machine, where every gear fits perfectly on a designer’s table.
The characters of this parable represent our most ancient archetypes: Mother and Child. As such, they should be saturated with the deepest emotions. All of this is present in the film, but the strings are tuned far too tight. At this point, the work turned inside out for me: the Pieta—that universal, timeless, living allegory of motherhood—crystallized here into a cold, mentally modeled objectivity. A perfect, admirable, but lifeless object. The parable did not lift off the ground; it clung to the sterility of the drawing board.
Despite the multiple twists regarding who is actually lying on the sacrificial altar, the story bypasses the heart and agitates only the mind. If this was the director’s intention, then we are seeing a masterpiece. Yet, this story haunts me like a monster in the corner—something you can get used to living with, but never truly desire.
The way the characters were grown beyond human proportions resulted in a sense of emptiness for me. The over-dramatization made it feel as if the characters should have been named 'Evil' or 'Pain.' They came from nowhere and led nowhere; in this sense, their sudden emotional shifts felt unearned. Furthermore, the nauseatingly didactic "flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood" ordeal only worsened the effect. Due to its clichéd nature, the characters' motives failed to evoke genuine shock, as we didn't experience them through the characters but were given them ready-made by the director.
In Bad Guy, I could accept the premise that a desire for another person could be so overwhelming that it explains (if not excuses) the brutal possession and eventual destruction of the object of adoration. Pieta is a similarly inverse story: here, the magnitude of maternal love is manifested in the cruelty of revenge. We never truly learn how many children are on the mother's list of losses. However, her revenge employs a method so inhuman that it twists motherhood itself out of its human essence.
If the cruel usurer is not her real son, then her use of motherhood as a weapon—ruthlessly exploiting the tragedy of maternal deprivation—makes her even more diabolical than the boy, questioning the very core of what motherhood means. If, however, she is truly taking revenge on her own abandoned son, the situation shatters the last fuses of human morality: we would have to recognize the embodiment of infinite maternal love and the monster who deals a doubly destructive blow to her own child in the same figure. Either way, the "Pieta" mother figure finds no human empathy or understanding.
And what of the boy? Can the mother’s past sin or the state of motherlessness explain his gargantuan, self-serving brutality? If not a spark of humanity is visible in the grown man, what strings resonate within him at the appearance of a being claiming to be his mother? The boy's "becoming human" is perhaps even less credible than the mother's "becoming a devil." Even if we grant him vulnerability, the double betrayal he suffers remains a shock to the system. The dead sacrificial child of this Pieta is not innocent; his diabolical soul rests in the arms of a diabolical mother.
Kim Ki-duk called his film a committed humanist work in the age of economic crisis. I still have much to ponder on that, as I don’t immediately see the connection. The fundamental problem of the film does not belong to the jurisdiction of Mammon. While the almighty power of money lingers in the background, the plot isn't in symbiosis with it. The boy isn't brutal out of necessity, but for self-indulgent pleasure. Interestingly, while the characters in Park Chan-wook’s revenge films groan under socio-economic pressure and remain infinitely, fallibly human—allowing us to empathize with them even in their darkest moments—a certain icy coldness radiates from Kim Ki-duk’s film.
The film's oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere is very strong, and the acting is excellent. Jo Min-su, in the role of the mother, has a convincing power in her stubborn silence and crazed persistence. I was also pleased to recognize Lee Jung-jin in the male lead, who provides a dramatic performance diametrically opposed to the honest, natural police officer he played in the TV series The Fugitive: Plan B.
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