BACK TO THE MYTHICAL ORIENT : "POETRY / SHI

I hate burying you all in depressing films the way I seem to be this week, but the seconda entry of the day will be another sad one… Add to that the fact that Poetry is actually a Korean film; you will understand why I kinda feel bad about it. What I like a lot about Asian cinema you see is that the emotions portrayed in the films are not “filmified”. You know what I mean, joy and happiness tends to be all engulfing and sadness devastating and destructive in movies. In Asian cinema however, everything is more… Well dignified. Sadness, negative emotions tend to be weighty and striking but the character will not be “engulfed” in it. The smaller tell-tale signs wrench our hearts, which is closer to real life in my view than the other approach. That is why Asian films tend to touch me more than Hollywood style movies – on an emotional level anyway… But I appear to have launched into the commentary already, let’s get the storyline first…
Mija is 66. She lives in a small town in South Korea with her grandson, Wook. His mother has left him with her and has moved to the city after her divorce, Wook and Mija have a “typical” grand-mother – grand-son relationship, even though they are not close. Mija is getting old, her memory is beginning to fail her (the doctor tells her she has to have a full check up in case it’s something really serious and Mija will get round to it one of these days…), she works part time assisting an old man who is half paralyzed because of a stroke to keep the little family afloat. In the spirit of doing something for herself, she starts taking poetry classes – with the aim of writing a poem herself… However ,upon the heels of this little experiment will first come her test results then the revelation of a devastating secret… Whether Mija will be able to cope with these shocks and whether she will be able to finish her poem – or even start it – is what we will find out as we watch the film…
No wonder this film won the award for best Screenplay at the Cannes film festival. The story has so many dimensions and subtleties… First of all, as I was discussing in the first paragraph, there is the emotion. The film is dominated by intense sadness but this is balanced out and made more real by Mija’s attitude to it. Like most people of her generation – especially in that part of the world – she puts a good face on it. Does not let go of her dignity. She searches desperately for a way out and for poetic inspiration – as possibly another symbol for escape – but does it with her head held high. It’s the little things that alert us to how she is really feeling. Mind you, there is one scene in the second half of the film that some viewers may find slightly offensive, but I didn’t mind it. Even a “difficult” situation like that is handled with the spirit of the film and in fact comes completely naturally with the story…
Another thing I really liked a lot about this film is the way the director and scriptwriter constantly play with the concept of knowledge. It’s a matter of not knowing whether or not someone else knows a given thing and not just between the characters; the story “plays” with us the spectators as well, so we are never quite sure when this quiet, dignified little film is going to throw us another curveball, keeping us on our toes, in a sense, right until the end.
My verdict? Tough to watch without a doubt, but it broadened my horizons… Put it on your “to watch” list…