FURY AT FANTASIA
Filmmaker Jung’s twist on Nikita
Jung Byung-gil wastes zero time with niceties in his wham-bam action flick The Villainess, which had a midnight screening at the Cannes Film Festival, closed the New York Asian Film Festival and opens Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival on Thursday evening.
Therein, the South Korean director drops viewers into the thick of it: a black-clad individual enters an ominous industrial building in the middle of the night and begins killing everyone in sight.
The catch? The camera shows everything from the assailant’s point of view. So as they walk down hallways, shooting at dozens of weapon-wielding gangsters — stopping only to re-load, with handgun and ammo held out for us to see — we are right there with them.
Midway through the onslaught, just when you think it’s over, the camera pulls out to reveal this vicious killer to be a cherub-cheeked young woman, albeit with a massive chip on her diminutive shoulder. Then the onslaught continues — this time with the camera swirling around as the knives come out and she engages in hand-to-hand combat.
Freshly dazed from a Monday morning screening of the film, I met Jung at Fantasia’s Concordia headquarters. He is in town for the week leading up to his film’s festival screening and was enjoying our city. He had taken in Cirque du Soleil’s new show, Volta, he informed me through an interpreter.
It was hard to find out much more about what he had been up to, or to get too deep into The Villainess, as the three-way conversation often left me feeling like Bill Murray in Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation — quizzically observing the back and forth between my subject and his interpreter, only to receive snippets of their conversation.
What I did learn, which is obvious upon viewing the film, is that Jung was inspired by Luc Besson’s 1990 female killing machine classic, Nikita, about a convicted felon who is given a new identity and trained as a police assassin.
In The Villainess, following her wildly entertaining killing spree (which will have famously vocal Fantasia fans cheering like there’s no tomorrow), Sook-hee (Kim Ok-bin, who starred in Park Chan-wook’s Thirst) is taken into police custody and offered a deal
wherein she works for the government for 10 years, after which she and her newborn daughter will be free.
Jung saw Nikita when he was 10 years old, he explained, and it stuck with him.
“Since I was young, my dream was to make a film about a woman, with a lot of action.”
Comparisons to Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, while equally appropriate, don’t ring as true with the director.
“I really like that film,” he said, “but the action is completely different than in my film. I was more influenced by Nikita.”
The difference, he noted, comes down to how the violence is shot.
“In Kill Bill, it’s one action, one cut,” he said, referring to Tarantino’s editing-heavy visual style. “I like to show all the action in one shot.”
While there are edits in Jung’s opening barrage, they are hidden, he explained, so it feels like we are watching one continuous event.
The proof is in the pudding. While the fight scenes in Kill Bill are a blast, Jung’s pack a more visceral punch, so to speak. The ante is upped by the way the sequence is filmed. The director and his team developed a special camera which was placed on the stunt performer’s head, putting viewers front and centre for each and every exchange.
After the initial mayhem, and another round of bloodletting when Sook-hee is imprisoned, things settle down as Jung and co-writer Jung Byeong-sik establish The Villainess’s elaborate, dramatic premise.
Sook-hee and her daughter are eventually resettled, we learn about her tumultuous past — her father was murdered, then her husband was murdered, explaining her desire for revenge — and our heroine gets a taste of a normal life, complete with a new love interest. But they keep pulling her back in.
A mid-film motorcycle chase-turned-sword fight (shot without computer graphics, Jung insisted) revives the adrenalin, as does a climactic battle on a bus. Each time, the director shows breathtaking ambition and ingenuity.
When asked what was next on the agenda, Jung said he recently met with a Hollywood agent concerning the possibility of an English-language production.
“He came to Korea and looked at the conditions there. We discussed possibilities. I liked what he was offering. It would be with movie actors from the United States, but the location would be in Korea.”
Sounds like trouble.