Following on the heels of Secret Sunshine, his sprawling, superb fourth feature, Lee Chang-dong's latest drama, Poetry, differentiates itself from the narrative and thematic tropes that have characterized the 57-year-old helmer's career thus far in ways that are at once subtle and hugely metaphysical. Mija (the wonderful Yun Jeong-hie), a 60-year-old grandmother, takes care of her mumbling ingrate of a grandson, Wook (Lee Da-wit), while her largely unseen daughter looks for work elsewhere. She makes do with funds from the government and a part-time job as a caretaker for an elderly man who looks to have suffered from a stroke. In the film's opening, a stop-by to her senescent employer is preceded by a visit to her doctor, who is far more worried about her blatant tendency towards memory loss than the tingling pain that runs up her arm.
Sadly, Mija's memory loss turns out to be an indicator of on-set dementia, a disease that fits perfectly in with Chang-dong's fascination with how words often betray the elusiveness of individual meaning. This interest comes to the forefront when Mija begins to start taking an amateur poetry course at the local community center, where her instructor obnoxiously states that the class has never really looked at an apple before. "Apples are better for eating" she concludes, but she continues with the course even as she learns that Wook was one of six students that gang-raped a young teenaged girl for several months before she committed suicide; the image of her face-down corpse floating downstream accompanies the film's title card.
The girl's mother, who we see early on, struggling to find words to describe her loss as Mija leaves her doctor's appointment, agrees to dismiss the charges for a single payment from the families of the boys, of which Mija is the only one who has trouble securing the funds. The film's key scene, however, concerns Mija's initial attempts to sway the mother's opinion, as her co-defendants send her on a mission to talk to her woman-to-woman in the countryside, where she works as a farmer. When she finally locates the mother, she has forgotten her charge and instead speaks about the weather and the upcoming harvest. It's a sequence that speaks directly to Chang-dong's curiosity with forms of expression and their limitations, seeing as Mija has succeeded in connecting with the mother but has failed to dissuade her or, more pointedly, define what presumably one of the most tragic events of her life should mean to her.
Poetry ostensibly complicates the long-form narrative structure that Chang-dong introduced and refined in Oasis and Secret Sunshine but it is also, by some margin, the director's most potently lyrical and aesthetically limpid film to date, working from his own screenplay. This can partially be pinned to the focus on nature that is slightly more pertinent and evident here than in Secret Sunshine, though riverbanks play a crucial allegorical role in both films. But Mija reaches out to understand nature, connect to it, and maybe even understand it -- and she doesn't find exactly what she hopes. Her instructor laughably instructs her to "beg" to find and understand beauty but she more often begs him to designate where she can find beauty and how she can properly express it.
By the end, Majia has indeed found her voice, but the rest of her life is a shambles and Chang-dong ends his film on a singularly devastating series of shots of the sites of her quotidian tasks, emptied of her bright, lovely presence. Her life, populated by violent, brutal and often depraved men, has come to coincide with the girl her grandson raped. And whether she has abandoned her home, died somewhere, or disappeared into thin air, her inner consciousness remains an essential mystery.
AKA Shi
Sadly, Mija's memory loss turns out to be an indicator of on-set dementia, a disease that fits perfectly in with Chang-dong's fascination with how words often betray the elusiveness of individual meaning. This interest comes to the forefront when Mija begins to start taking an amateur poetry course at the local community center, where her instructor obnoxiously states that the class has never really looked at an apple before. "Apples are better for eating" she concludes, but she continues with the course even as she learns that Wook was one of six students that gang-raped a young teenaged girl for several months before she committed suicide; the image of her face-down corpse floating downstream accompanies the film's title card.
The girl's mother, who we see early on, struggling to find words to describe her loss as Mija leaves her doctor's appointment, agrees to dismiss the charges for a single payment from the families of the boys, of which Mija is the only one who has trouble securing the funds. The film's key scene, however, concerns Mija's initial attempts to sway the mother's opinion, as her co-defendants send her on a mission to talk to her woman-to-woman in the countryside, where she works as a farmer. When she finally locates the mother, she has forgotten her charge and instead speaks about the weather and the upcoming harvest. It's a sequence that speaks directly to Chang-dong's curiosity with forms of expression and their limitations, seeing as Mija has succeeded in connecting with the mother but has failed to dissuade her or, more pointedly, define what presumably one of the most tragic events of her life should mean to her.
Poetry ostensibly complicates the long-form narrative structure that Chang-dong introduced and refined in Oasis and Secret Sunshine but it is also, by some margin, the director's most potently lyrical and aesthetically limpid film to date, working from his own screenplay. This can partially be pinned to the focus on nature that is slightly more pertinent and evident here than in Secret Sunshine, though riverbanks play a crucial allegorical role in both films. But Mija reaches out to understand nature, connect to it, and maybe even understand it -- and she doesn't find exactly what she hopes. Her instructor laughably instructs her to "beg" to find and understand beauty but she more often begs him to designate where she can find beauty and how she can properly express it.
By the end, Majia has indeed found her voice, but the rest of her life is a shambles and Chang-dong ends his film on a singularly devastating series of shots of the sites of her quotidian tasks, emptied of her bright, lovely presence. Her life, populated by violent, brutal and often depraved men, has come to coincide with the girl her grandson raped. And whether she has abandoned her home, died somewhere, or disappeared into thin air, her inner consciousness remains an essential mystery.
AKA Shi
