Pulp fun turns to horror in 'Lady'

Don't be fooled by the baroque music playing in Park Chan-wook's ``Lady Vengeance." It's not a classy affair, even though the strings and such provide the wonderful illusion of class.

This is pulp, and Park is a lurid maestro.

The movie completes the South Korean director's so-called ``revenge trilogy," and it's the most accomplished film of the three, harking back to plot points and characters in 2002's ``Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" and 2003's `` Oldboy," while devising a sensational visual style that spins a violent yarn into something kaleidoscopically seedy.

Here Park brings us the sad story of Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae) , a convicted child murderer, whom we meet upon her release from prison. Her crime was a little more complicated than the cops and prosecutors knew. She was really just some psycho's patsy. But she took the fall, the feds took her newborn daughter, and she spent her sentence plotting revenge.

To judge by the hilarious flashbacks and jail-time montages Park whips up, these were 13 crazy years. The women sit around in rooms, looking listless. Then someone snaps and stirs everyone else up. Suddenly they're vipers in a tiny wicker basket.

Lee's scheme includes recruiting her fellow inmates as accomplices. The girl to whom she donated a kidney owes her a favor. So does the young woman Lee saved from the sexual ruthlessness of the jailhouse bully.

These sequences are lite-opera and black comedy, with a terrific cartoon kick. (That bully takes a spill that would tickle Tom or Jerry.) The women's prison picture stuff made me laugh out loud more than once, partly because his actors are such deft comedians (Lee Young-ae's performance is especially fierce) , and partly because the director knows how to crack jokes with his framing and editing.

Time served, Lee departs for the straight world and takes a job in a Seoul bakery (her skills were devilishly honed in the joint). She tells her smitten 20-year-old co-worker (Kim Si-hu) about her past. But the exchange is played as a dour joke. Lee says, ``I'm planning to kill another person," then asks, ``Do you think I'm sexy?"

It's hard to say, but the exchange is really apropos of nothing but farce. And for most of ``Lady Vengeance," Park is playing with us. But the jokey atmosphere dissipates and the fun turns inside out in the movie's last act. To fulfill her payback plan, Lee gathers a group of parents who've lost their children to a serial-killing schoolteacher. After watching the videos he's made of the murders, they consider whether to take revenge, discussing in an abandoned classroom how they might do it: As a mob or ``a la carte," as one father puts it?

At this point, the tabloid bliss of the movie's early passages is a distant memory, and Park lowers us into a phantasmagoric pit of moral dread. The killer's videos of terrified children blur the boundaries between retribution and exploitation. On the one hand: What greater motive would a grieving parent need to go after a sicko? On the other: Please.

Park's preference for kids in jeopardy infuriates some viewers. But in the trilogy's previous installments, namely the repugnant and coolly self-satisfied ``Oldboy," his filmmaking never left the apparently limitless realm of his demented fancy.

Here the director attempts to break the seal on his hermetic reality and let real-world horrors in. You can feel the parents' anguish for one thing. This will be a cold comfort to folks who'll bristle with wonder at how anyone can direct a young actor to howl for her life with a plastic bag over her head.

Yet for once Park has stopped smirking long enough to consider the practical point of violence in a way that's pertinent to his own gruesome cinematic pursuits. It's taken an entire trilogy and a substantial body count for him to conclude that vengeance doesn't bring hope, catharsis, or closure -- only the sense that the world has gone completely mad.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.