Ending Friday September 17th on a good note with the last of three films, Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry was an exceptional life drama. Poetry won Lee the Best Screenplay Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Much like the its title, the narrative of the film was very poetic on many levels beyond the fact that the lead character Yang Mija (played by veteran Yong Jeong-hee) enrolls in a poetry class at the beginning of the story.
WARNING: The following review may contain spoilers to Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry.
The film begins and ends as a giant poem, but is seamless throughout as if peering into a chapter of someone’s life. Although categorizing Poetry as a slice-of-life movie does not do it any justice, because what you take from it is much more than a story of a cheerful elderly woman. The film revolves around Yang Mija, an elder Korean woman who lives in a small town with her teenage grandson and is financially supported by the government and a part-time maid to an old man who suffered from a stroke. The usually cheerful Yang is dragged into dramatic affairs that leave her lost and broken. A young girl commits suicide as a result of being raped by a group of schoolmates one of whom is Yang’s grandson, and she has to pay the consequences.
I said the film can be poetic on many levels beyond its title because even amongst the endless struggle of the rape incident, Yang’s inability to pay off the girl’s mother, and the questionable relationship between her and the older man he works for, the film remained untouched and not overly dramatic. Even in situations where other films would use excess tension to exaggerate the drama, Poetry kept its calm to match the serenity of the small town and to remain tied to the unrelenting reality of life. Simply put, even when the world seemed the darkest in the eyes of the characters, it was still beautiful to watch.
After watching Poetry, I have seen a total of three Korean films at the Toronto International Film Festival and they all did not disappoint. Late Autumn was a unique international banana tale, I Saw The Devil was a gruesomely awesome revenge flick, and Poetry is poetry itself personified as a film. I am probably extremely late in realizing this, but Korean cinema is very, very powerful in every way. I think China, Hong Kong and Japan may need to lookout because here comes a new contender as Asia’s powerhouse national cinema. In the coming awards season, I won’t be too surprised if South Korea chose Poetry as their frontrunner for Best Foreign Language Film. Stay tuned.
Banana Rating:
/10
-phibz.
Next and last, TIFF review on Daron Aronofsky’s Black Swan!
