Recensioni de* critic*

Such an unpleasant mise-en-scène might be tolerable if Kim was interested in examining the social and emotional reasons for its existence. But the director only views misery in simple terms, composing images of sadism with a level of fleeting enjoyment that borders on the obscene... These images carry an inherent vileness that fits right in line with Pieta's view of the mankind as a greedy, spiteful force that only deserves one fate. This is Kim's cinema of repellence, and he can keep it.

After the relatively mellow Airirang and Amen (both 2011), Korean shock auteur Kim Ki-duk returns to form with this brutal, unyielding exploitation film... This is brilliant in some stretches and deplorable in others, with the director's usual extreme violence and depraved sexuality.

It's during the first hour, however, that Kim's expertly modulated morality play is most gripping, presenting Kang-do's hand-smashing, leg-breaking brutality for profit as a reflection of a Korean society in which the industrial working class is crushed underfoot by corporate capitalist development. Alas, after establishing a central parent-child relationship rife with wacko biblical undertones, the director finds nowhere to take his story except into standard vengeance territory...

Morally cunning and with a tone as black as pitch, "Pieta," the 18th film from the South Korean director Kim Ki-duk, is a deeply unnerving revenge movie in which redemption is dangled like a cat toy before a cougar.

Pieta succeeds in repulsing and enlightening viewers simultaneously, even if its views on self-sacrifice and redemption are cynical. Kim depicts violence and sexuality with frankness; they are physical manifestations of fear and desperation rather than an opportunity for exploitation. Like Scorsese's explorations of Catholic guilt, Pieta evenly juxtapositions these manifestations with the eternal struggle of the spiritual experience.

It's likely that two incestuous interactions between the purported blood relatives will be a deal breaker for most viewers, and both of these scenes admittedly play with a degree of poseur provocation. Stick with the film, though, and you might find yourself strangely moved by its oddball mix of ripe melodrama, overwrought violence and regional verisimilitude.

As with anything, presentation can make even the most noxious tale somewhat tolerable. Kim has a plain, direct, almost earnest directing style that makes following "Pieta" on one level satisfying, even as its unsatisfying destination is never for a second in doubt.

Kim's provocations ring so profoundly hollow that it's frankly astounding that they've managed to register with anyone at all, let alone the purveyors of one of world cinema's major prizes. The manner in which the filmmaker, like the staunchest secret conservatives, fervently prods taboos only serves to reinforce them.

Pieta is maybe one of the worst films of 2012, not because it is badly made but because it strains so desperately to be intellectual and contemporary. Not only does it try to touch on far more topics than any one film could handle—"extreme capitalism" (as the director puts it), the duality of feminism, the role of family in society, religion, crime and brutality, etc.—but it does so in such a backward way that trying to untangle its ideological confusion is almost impossible.

I'd love to go into Kim's dramaturgical singularities, his editing rhythms, the synopsis, et al to set up a more all-encompassing idea of what Pieta does right and (more often) wrong, but the truth is I couldn't stop staring at that fucking pixel—or at least the zone of the pixel in its absence, each cut promising its Christ-like re-emergence from the murk of his mise en scène—long enough to follow whatever the hell motivated this incest.

A movie genre based on pure physiology actually exists—it's called porno. Why the premiere of Pieta took place in the main competition of the Venice Film Festival, and not on PunishTube, remains a mystery.

The worst major festival winner since the Palme d'Or for Amour.