Currently in competition at the 2010 Cannes film festival, the great Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s fifth feature POETRY is opening domestically here in Seoul and is available with English subtitles at the Yongsan CGV. I can confidently say that this film will be among my ten favorites when I put together my best films list of 2010, and it would not surprise me if it is number one. Quite simply, no other director today makes films like Lee, with a style that mixes convention with realism, understated simplicity with dramatic flourishes, combined with a great feel for the space of his characters. Moreover, Lee is one of the few directors today, and perhaps the only Korean director, dealing with social and moral issues in a fairly direct manner. In some ways he is hopelessly out of touch and old-fashioned. As Lee himself has mockingly said: “I take everything seriously. But who likes a stiff who only talks about serious stuff?” (Kim, 63) It is this very dated quality, however, that I most value in his films. In today’s film world, it is surprisingly refreshing to encounter a director who is as serious as Lee, and even more rare to find one with his mixture of stylistic skill and humanistic realism. (WARNING: some spoilers ahead)

POETRY revolves around the main character of Mija, an elderly woman who is raising her 16 year-old grandson, Wook. She has to work as a maid and personal assistant to an elderly man who has had a stroke in order to get by, and she stands out within the small suburban community for her eccentric style. After an opening sequence when we see a dead body floating in the river, we follow Mija as she learns she may be contracting Alzheimer’s disease. Searching for meaning in her life (a recurrent theme of Lee’s, especially prominent in his last film, SECRET SUNSHINE), she decides to take a poetry class, spurred on by a childhood memory of being told she had potential as a poet. However, the main plot quickly reveals itself: the dead girl who we see in the opening sequence has committed suicide because she had been repeatedly gang-raped by Mija’s grandson and his five friends. The fathers of the other boys have a meeting and decide each will pay 5 million won to the girl’s mother (a farmer) in the hopes of keeping the police from becoming involved. The rest of the film deals with Mija trying to come to terms with her grandson’s crime as well as her own quest to finally write a poem.

Those familiar with Lee’s films will not find this plot summary surprising. Lee consistently represents middle-class Korean society as being morally bankrupt and guilty of covering up the crimes of the past, not unlike European auteur Michael Haneke. But he differs from Haneke in not focusing on these characters; instead, he is interested in the more complex characters who feel like outsiders to this society. This has been especially true in Lee’s more recent films. After starting his career by focusing on male characters in a crisis of masculinity (GREEN FISH and PEPPERMINT CANDY), Lee has moved towards the romantic couple in OASIS, the single mother in SECRET SUNSHINE, and now another invisible character within this society, the elderly grandmother. It is also as if Lee is responding to critics of his earlier work, such as Kim Kyung Hyun and Kim So Young, who argued that Lee, despite wanting to make films from a critical perspective, basically left masculinity unquestioned and femininity unexamined in GREEN FISH and PEPPERMINT CANDY. This is certainly not the case with his latest works. In fact, one could even argue that POETRY acts as a kind of feminist response to Bong Joon-ho’s MOTHER, released last year. Both films feature eccentric elderly protagonists, but instead of viewing the character as crazy and destructive, Lee views her as the one of the few ethical characters in this highly compromised world.

The difference in these characters is perhaps related to their respective relationship to genre. MOTHER is very much a genre deconstruction of the maternal melodrama, and thus needs its character to behave as she does in order to carry out this plot. POETRY, on the other hand, is probably the first film in which Lee abandons genre and moves closer to an art cinema narration. One of the most remarkable things about Lee’s previous films is that they were popular successes domestically, despite their challenging style and subject matter. This is primarily because of their generic appeal and use of star power. POETRY is much more a character study, and unfortunately is unlikely to attract much of an audience. This is intriguing because part of the reason why Lee abandoned with career as a writer and  became a filmmaker at the age of 40 was that he felt literature no longer held a great deal of social relevance. It now seems that Lee feels the same way about cinema. Making a film that centers, in part, around poetry is a way of commenting on this fact. As Mija’s teacher/poet explicitly states, poetry is a dying form. So, Lee seems to believe, is a certain view of the world that an increasingly coarse culture now ignores. This is what makes Lee so old-fashioned, like a cranky old man who dislikes where the world is heading. And while I would agree that Lee is perhaps overly didactic in his condemnation of postmodern culture, it is still a view worth expressing, especially when it is articulated with Lee’s degree of cinematic skill and intelligence.

Maybe because he has abandoned genre, Lee’s style n POETRY includes more innovation than usual, although it is still told mostly through realist conventions. Exceptions to this are two sequences in which, as part of their poetry class, the students directly address the camera and try to tell about “the most beautiful moment of their life.” These scenes are quite theatrical in quality, and are among the more memorable and wonderful in the movie, despite their lack of direct relation to the plot. The other major stylistic breaks occurs at the end of the film, in which Mija’s poetry teacher reads her poem while the camera revisits spaces shown earlier, but now empty of Mija’s presence. There is clear debt here to both Akira Kurosawa’s IKIRU (1952) as well as Michelangelo Antonioni’s modernist classic L’ECLISSE (1962), but the effect works perfectly with Lee’s thematic and stylistic purpose and is not simply an empty homage. Like Kurosawa’s protagonist, Mija has accomplished something before she fades away (in this case mentally rather than physically), although this ethical act may not have any positive real world value. For Lee, by this point, that may not be possible anyways. All one can do is live with their own actions: this is the only heroic action remaining in the postmodern world.

I’ll conclude with this final quote from Lee. Although he is commenting about the differences between the 80s and 90s, the remarks are if anything more true today:

“In the 90s, being serious kills the party because you make a fool out of yourself by talking about things people already know but choose not to talk about. In the 80s, there was some merit in telling the truth. But by the 90s, truth was not appreciated. Here I am, still taking things seriously and trying to tell the truth. How irritating! (laughs)” (Kim, 63)

Quotes taken from:

Kim Young-jin, LEE CHANG-DONG (Seoul: Korean Film Archive, 2007)

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