Rating: 4.5/5
Anti-Criterion Challenge 2024 | 45/52 | Korean Screen’s 100 Greatest Korean Films
Yang Mi-ja sits in the hospital waiting room with several others. She comes to the doctor regarding her arm feeling prickly. She struggles to find the word for it—she’s been forgetting words lately. The doctor is more concerned about this than her arm—she’s 66 and should see a specialist in Seoul. As she leaves the hospital, she passes a woman crying because her 16-year-old daughter has drowned from an apparent suicide.
On the way home, Mi-ja sees a flyer about a poetry class at the cultural center. She comes home to find her 16-year-old grandson, Jong-wook, curled up on the bed, his music blaring throughout the apartment. Because they’re in the same grade, Mi-ja asks her grandson about the girl who killed herself, but Jong-wook doesn’t have much to say about her. Later that night, per the doctor’s request, Mi-ja works her arm by playing badminton with Jong-wook outside. He soon stops when he receives a text and runs off to hang out with his friends. Mi-ja tries to stop him from going out so late, but he ignores her.
The next day, she attends the Cultural Center for the poetry class. The teacher tells them the most essential aspect of poetry is seeing—if you learn to see for the first time, words will come naturally. The assignment is to write one poem by the end of the month-long course. Mi-ja takes notes about the things she sees, such as flowers. Soon, she sees more about her life than she realized.
If you’ve seen any Lee Chang-dong films, such as Burning, you know that his style is slow, letting details accumulate like sediment in a river. As a novelist, his movies have a patience that doesn’t always feel immediately rewarding, but it makes sense when it all comes together.
Like many women actors, Yoon Jeong-hee had a prolific acting career from her twenties and thirties but found less work as she grew older. Her last movie before Poetry was in 1994. Poetry, her last film before retiring, won her the most acclaim. Her performance is graceful and nuanced, eliciting empathy with so little. Her character becomes enigmatic as we wonder what motivates some of her choices.
The film explores the surface way we see life versus the inner details that make it rich and complex. When we meet a stranger, we may find their sense of humor off-putting but learn of a tragedy in their past where humor is their coping mechanism. It doesn’t forgive the humor but adds color to the understanding.
Nature, as a whole, has a sense of pure beauty—but when scaled down and surveyed, we find endless waves of suffering and pain that sustain the ecosystem. We don’t have to love or participate in it, but it is a truth we cannot ignore when building our understanding of the world.
Perhaps then, we can genuinely appreciate beauty when we see it. Or it will swallow us into oblivion.
Before crossing the black river, With my soul's last breath I am beginning to dream A bright sunny morning. Again I awake, blinded by the light And meet you standing by me.
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