A girl’s broken body drifts gently down a river, apricots emancipate themselves from the branches of trees and a man’s happiest moment is simply having a place to call his own.
Lee Chang-Dong is a simmering talent from South Korea often sadly overlooked for the likes of Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy) and Bong Joon-Ho (Mother). Poetry,however, marks his fifth feature to achieve widespread critical acclaim having received the prize for best screenplay and a special mention at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Chang-Dong has created in Poetry a mysterious, beautiful and unhurried look at one woman’s struggles with daily life and how the impact of death motivates her to find new life, or at least a new grasp of her own. As is usual for the director it’s a lengthy affair but a thought provoking one about life spurred on by death and art. These are issues close to the directors own heart for he served as Minister for Culture from 2002-2004 only retiring over an inability to act to serve his country’s artwork.
Mija (Jeong-hie Yun) takes care of her grandson Wook (Da-wit Lee), left by his mother who now seeks a new life in Busan. Wook along with five other delinquent friends enacts a terrible crime against a girl of their school. Coupled with this she discovers after a routine check that she’s developing Alzheimer’s, the cause of her already faltering words. These events push Mija onto a path that culminates in a refined perception of the world and her place in it. Allowing her to assume an identity and action that befit the fierce wisdom and honest inquisitiveness that glow behind her eyes.
At the heart of the picture is Mija a grounded but eccentric grandmother who displays glimpses of charm, beauty, humanity and cheekiness that encourage and allow us to extend our own imagination backwards to see the women how she was, and how she could well have been. As Mija comes to terms with the tragedies that have befallen herself and the girl, as well as the horrifying attitudes displayed by those around her she’s moved to a newfound and instinctive exploration of life and a search for beauty that is perhaps only natural given the darkness of the world around. Though Mija does conjure reconciliation and emotional pacification through the eponymous medium it’s more her renewed spirit to confront the imbalances of her surroundings that is the poetry of this piece.
Yun who came out of retirement after 16 years for the role has chosen well in returning to the big screen. Every scene crackles with intelligent rumination on the meaning of life; and indeed what it means to be alive. Poetry shows us that people aren’t always what they seem to be and in fact what they seem to be is often not all they have the potential to be either. Here Chang-Dong unfortunately ventures into platitudes of seismic proportions. There’s a creeping sense that here is a film that is self-consciously aware of its own profundity and is trying hard to really be something grandiose. As the film ebbs along however so too does this feeling ebb away. The eloquence of Chang-Dong’s script and the quiet earnestness and simmering power that Yun gives to her performance liftsPoetry away from triteness.
However what’s most remarkable isn’t the journey of self-discovery that Mija cultivates through her emerging appreciation of beauty but what Mija’s transformation allows Chang-Dong to say about Korean society and its apparent apathy towards, and complicity in misogyny, moral corruption, familial breakdown and delinquent youth. There are deep running hypocrisies throughout, especially towards age. Here the characters around Mija treat her with all the ceremonial respect deserving of her years but ultimately fail to follow with any real respect at all. Grimly compelling too are the disturbingly Machiavellian fathers of Wook’s gang who calmly put a price on morality and justice. In this way Poetry serves as a resounding cultural indictment and its Mija that manifestly embodies tradition, oldness, and through her classes, the dedication to beauty, art and self-reflection; something missing – especially in the men – in those around her.
It can feel incomprehensible with the structural composition of a slowly blossoming poem but it builds line by line and scene by scene to a moving and poignant ending that illustrates the connective fibre built between Mija and her grandson’s young victim. Mija’s own regret and melancholy for her wasted life is heartbreakingly revealed. It’s one final blow from Chang-Dong who has, although never forcefully, urged with Poetry to look beyond what’s easy to do and to find what’s just, what’s right and what’s beautiful. It’s in equal parts happy and sad that though Mija finds these things for herself it is the wretched world she is subjected to that forces her hand.
