Revenge is certainly a dedicated film, mostly in its first half or so (up till about part 5, yep this is in patts), where the dedication is to having extremely beautiful pictures to go with one of the more oblique dramas that has ever been made - or at least screened at Cannes and later got into Criteeion via Scorsese. Everything is not so much at a remove as it is meditative to the point of inertia. It's like the filmmakers set out to craft a work where the pulpy joys and exploitation-type of thrills associated with a revenge story are thrown off its axis for the sake of... poetry I suppose.
Maybe at least for the first half it was not a great idea to watch after a long day of work and a poor night of prior sleep; for all the sumptuous lighting and evocation of a spare, tragic but also By-Nature-it-Surrounds-and-binds-us visuals, it's easy to forget what a juicy premise is at the center: a foolish and seemingly diabolical man (who we won't get to know really through the course of the story- also by design) kills a young girl and the family swears revenge - or rather the father takes a mute and/or deaf woman to birth a son who will have one purpose which is to avenge his half sister. What kind of life is that for a person predetermined to be one way? Is it like a cult mentality or even like those communities where a man is told this is what one must be for all time in relation to the world?
The problem is Sungu, the boy who becomes a man set to only find this man Yan and avenge her for his father (there may or may not be the art house version of the scene from the Raimi Spiderman where Norman tells Harry to do just that) is not really allowed to be an active presence until halfway into the picture. Either the scenes with the father, his family, Yan and the community around them needed more fleshing out or something more emotionally speaking, or just condense the set up and get to it being about Sungu's journey.
I suppose I'm so critical because once it gets to part 5 and beyond, where we see Sunju on his journey (at one point he is tempted by a lonely Romanian woman and the end of this scene is truly disturbing in an effective way) and, after being visited by ghosts of dad and half-sis, comes to the area where he may finally find Yan... and what he comes to is bitterly ironic, how the director and writer come upon this fate and how revenge in its way unfolds is fascinating and weirdly gripping. And I was absorbed by and liked the last ten minutes where the poetic and philosophic merge together into this mournful but theatrical musing, about how the totality of life and death come together under that sun and by the ocean.
In other words, Revenge is uneven and frustrating, though maybe that's more of an MP than a YP. I can't entirely recommend it, and the Tarkovsky comparisons I've seen on here and elsewhere don't add up for me (he also takes his deliberative ass time but there's more psychically and spiritually I get from there than this gives for at least a while), but the moments it has are vivid and even horrific and jarring.
