Poetry (Friday, February 18, 2011) (7)

I have seen a bunch of Korean films in the last few years and most of them have been wonderful. There is a simplicity about them that is very interesting. Generally focusing on normal domestic situations (even when they're monster movies or documentaries), they tell straightforward, sometimes sad and frequently powerful stories. Perhaps it's unfair to lump them all together as a monolithic singular thing (just as with American cinema, there's no reason why there can't be a wide variety of genres and aesthetic styles), but the ones that I have seen have shared an interesting melancholia and directness reminiscent of the best of Ozu or the Dardenne brothers.

Lee Chang-dong's Poetry falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum in terms of new Korean films. It is not as sad and desperate as Kim So Yong's Treeless Mountain or In Between Days, not as flashy as Bong Joon-ho's The Host or Mother and not as bizarre as Im Sang-soo's The Housemaid. It is somewhat of a 'Goldilocks' film, falling just in the middle of all of these other directors and films. For me, I would have preferred it be more of one of those things than just middle, but what we get is still very nice.

At times the story and the way it unravels is reminiscent of Lee's last film, Secret Sunshine (just released in New York a few months ago). Mija is a woman in her 60s who lives in a small country town. She is very poor, making just a bit of money as a housekeeper for an old man. She raises her impudent teenage grandson (her daughter, the boy's mother is out of the picture) and is fighting depression and dementia. She joins a poetry class where the instructor teaches her how to look at the world in a different, more artistic way and she sets to work crafting her own poem. As she does this, her life gets more complicated as her grandson gets into trouble that she does not expect or know how to deal with.

There is a lovely dialectic in the film between the lyrical way Mija looks at the world as a poet (or poet-in-training), and how the reality for her on the ground is much less fluid and beautiful. She has to live in a world of pain and filth but rise above that to experience the world as an artist. She struggles with knowing how to behave and react in the two worlds: the day-to-day world with an unexpected challenge from her grandson, and the more comfortable, emotional world of poetry that is still new to her. Neither place is totally easy for her to be in and neither world allows her to live in it without difficulty.

Yun Jeong-hie is absolutely fabulous as Mija. She moves from what seems to be aloofness at the beginning, to what we are told is early-onset Alzheimer's beautifully. Her inability to communicate with her grandson, or really anyone for that matter, is visible not just in her difficulty in speaking, but also in the pain we see on her face. She knows what's wrong and what's right in most situations but has a hard time expressing these feelings.

The narrative structure is very similar to that of Secret Sunshine (to the point that I felt the story could be written by Lee before I knew it was), but I think the script is better in that than in this one. There is a gentleness that pervades the film that is interrupted several times by bigger 'bangs' of plot direction change. This trick feels a bit more blunt here than in Sunshine and a bit forced. (Time will tell if this is just a result of Lee being a mediocre writer or if this is just a stylistic flourish that will change over the years). Both films are just a bit too long, as well, and could benefit from tightening the story by about 15 minutes.

This film is certainly good enough to fit in well with the top tier of new Korean films (like Treeless Mountain, In Between Days, The Host and Secret Sunshine), but falls slightly below those in terms of overall beauty and virtuosity. I think there are moments here that feel a bit empty to me, that I recognize are important to the film, but I don't relate to. Much of the film is fabulous, but some of it is merely average.

Stars: 3 of 4