Pieta (2012)

# Pietà

**Summary: 10/10: a scalding, nearly unwatchable masterpiece that turns Michelangelo's art into an indictment of usury and late-stage capitalism, and proves that the most unbearable violence in cinema is the violence a director refuses to show you.**



> "The pine tree that once stood here / Was cut down and disappeared." — *Daldongnae: A Slum Under the Moonlight*, NHK World documentary

Kim Ki-duk is Korea's most admired filmmaker and one of my great personal favorites, and the reason is his creativity, which never once in his career depended on a budget. He is the undisputed master of "show, don't tell." Consider *3-Iron*, in which the leading man never speaks a word and it takes you half the film to notice, because Kim has already told you everything through a golf club, a bathroom scale, a shirt washed by hand in a stranger's sink. I expect young filmmakers will be studying him for the next century because what he does looks simple and is not.

After *Dream* in 2008, when his lead actress nearly died on set during a scene, Kim disappeared for three years into a shack and a private existential crisis. *Pietà* is his first real narrative feature film since that unfortunate event. That such a silence produced *Pietà* is not a comeback; it is a verdict.

Has he lost his spirituality? the serenity of *Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring*? Not for a moment. He has only changed testaments.

The title points first to Michelangelo's work of the same name, and to the whole tradition of the Virgin cradling her broken son, an image so absorbed into Christian culture that we no longer consider its significance. And there is a mother in this movie too, played by Cho Min-soo in a performance of genuine ferocity, and there is a dead son she must carry and bury beneath a pine tree; the sculpture assembles itself in front of you, as action in the film instead of marble. The Italian title word means pity, and also piety, and Gang-do (Lee Jung-jin) does eventually learn something that could be called by either name. But this is Kim Ki-duk, and the image is multi-layered.

Follow the reference where it actually leads. Invoking the Pietà invokes Christ; and Christ, in the one episode where the Gospels let him lose his temper, went into the Temple with a whip of cords, overturned the tables, and drove out the money changers and dove sellers. It is the single most physically violent act attributed to him, and it was aimed at unscrupulous profiteers.

Gang-do is a money changer. His boss is a money changer. They collect on loans at rates designed never to be repaid, and the collateral is not property; it is the body of the debtor, insured and then broken. The insurance policy pays what the man cannot. What would Jesus say? And Kim is not inventing this. American corporations spent decades quietly taking out life insurance policies on rank-and-file employees, naming themselves the beneficiaries, collecting on the deaths of over-worked stock clerks and cafeteria workers while the families got nothing. The industry calls it corporate-owned life insurance. Everyone else calls it "dead peasant insurance." Kim arrived at the same equation on the other side of the Pacific, working alone in a Seoul alley, and he arrived at it without a spreadsheet.

Kim sets this film precisely where it belongs: in the slums, the favelas, the daldongnae, the "moon" villages built with scrap high on the hillsides, where men with three fingers remaining on a hand keep the lathes turning to feed their families. Cinematographer Jo Young-jik shoots it handheld and drained of color, in a consuming darkness that swallows even the daytime exteriors, and, crucially, with a camera that keeps turning away at exactly the moment of violence. Then, midway through, the film delivers its quietest and most devastating piece of information. This whole district is scheduled for demolition. High-rises are coming.

Not public housing. Not socialist blocks for the people currently living and bleeding in these alleys. Luxury condominiums. Ask who buys them. Not the man in the machine shop, who will be gone, relocated to nowhere, his workshop a hole in the ground. The units will be bought as assets, by people and increasingly by entities for whom a home is a yield, held empty or churned as short-term rentals, priced past every person the neighborhood ever contained. The lender in the alley takes a finger. The capital men in the tower take the entire district. The difference is scale, and the quality of the suit.

Kim picks up Christ's whip and rally-cry. *Pietà* is ultimately about the evil of money: about income disparity, about late-stage capitalism's genius for making cruelty look like arithmetic, about a system that has learned to extract value from suffering and then bill the sufferer for the privilege, about the human cost of profit.

The film is, I should be honest, revolting to sit through. Difficult, ugly, and at moments almost unendurable. And here is where Kim again leaps ahead of his peers: he achieves that without putting real violence on screen. He shows you the setup, and the aftermath, and the tool; the act itself he leaves to you. He relocates the atrocity from the silver frame into your own imagination, where you must build it yourself out of your own materials, which is why it will not wash off. The viewer becomes complicit in the manufacture of the horror they are enduring. No filmmaker working with a hundred times his budget has ever bought an effect that lands that hard.

This was a low-budget film: there was no money, no CGI, no special FX, no AI-generated frames. Principal photography took about three weeks. A camera, an amazing cinematographer, a derelict district, two extraordinary actors, and an idea pursued to its end without flinching. That is the whole apparatus.

Which is why Kim Ki-duk's death was such a huge loss to the industry. Despite the controversies that surround him, Kim remains a master, and the proof is on the screen: we live in a time when the answer to constraint is to spend more, or to synthesize more, and here is a man with almost nothing building something denser in meaning, more morally serious, and more genuinely frightening than the entire output of a big-money studio. The tables are still standing in the Temple. Without Kim, who is left to pick up Christ's whip?