The Korean movie “Poetry” is a bit slow-moving and maybe a bit too
long but still worth watching and thinking about – a really
intelligent and thoughtful examination of a very kind person faced
with difficult moral decisions and with tremendous social obstacles.
I’m almost sure this movie must be by the director of the great Oasis,
and maybe the same director also did the even better Korean film
Mother? The three films do share a sensibility; Poetry probably the
weakest of the trilogy because of some improbabilities in the plot
development and the very slow pace – doesn’t have the dramatic tension
and suspense of Mother or the pathos of Oasis. In Poetry, a 60ish
woman, facing first signs of Alzheimer’s, is caring for her teenage
grandson, a sullen and difficult brat, and she learns that the
grandson may have been part of a group of boys who bullied a young
girl in school, driving her to suicide. Strangely, the reaction of
school officials is entirely to cover this up by getting the families
to pay off the family of the dead girl. That seems to me not only
morally repugnant but unlikely – though the film does set up Korean
society as a place where people smile at one another and brush trouble
and difficulties under the rug, so to speak. One problem with the
movie is that it is inconceivable as this very kind family of the girl
who died would not have seen many signs of her distress and tried to
get her help of some kind. It’s convenient for the structure of the
movie to make the family unaware but if the director wanted that to be
so he should have made the girl’s family highly dysfunctional. That
aside, the movie follows the 60ish woman through her many painful
decisions as she tries desperately to preserve the reputation of her
grandson. It’s a burden she cannot, and should not even try, to
carry.
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I love Lee Chang Dong's Poetry and have no problem with its slow pace. We are culturally conditioned by Hollywood to demand a fast pace, reject ambiguity and demand a complete resolution of all issues. That is why so few Americans and Canadians appreciate great directors like Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer. LIke you, I also love Oasis and highly recommend another film by this director, Peppermint candy, although it helps to know a fair bit about recent South Korean history to fully appreciate it. It is the most effective example I know of a film that begins at the end of the story and ends at the beginning. LIke you, I also like Mother, but that is a film by Bong Joon Ho.
ReplyDeleteThanks for correction on "Mother." (I didn't look it up while writing this post, as I try to keep these posts spontaneous and free of research and pedantry - but I do like to get the facts straight.) PC is in my Q and I'll move it to the top. I see some hope in some recent American films - Boyhood being one example of a film that let the story set its own, necessary pace.
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