Poetry

POETRY is simply the best film ever made. The plot is about a woman in her mid 60s who is raising her grandson and wants to take a poetry class at the local community center. Her desire is to write one poem. Sounds simple. Wrong. This film is all about secrets being revealed and the consequences of actions. It is about forgiveness and restitution. I saw this film twice in the movie theater . This film was made for discussion. Writer/Director Lee Chang-Dong deserves an Academy Award for this film- actually he deserves 4 Academy Awards- best screenplay, best director, best foreign film and BEST FILM. Brilliant and genius are inadequate words to describe the masterpiece that is POETRY. I hope POETRY becomes available in the 2 DVD disc form ( with director's commentary and extras) for region one soon. VERY SOON.

I am often reluctant to put myself into the hands of an art filmmaker and then have to sit passively absorbing something. Is it just some abstract philosophical notion, as I found, somewhat, with Quatre Volte a few weeks ago. It was alright, even pretty good, but I wanted something more.

As Poetry's first scenes unfolded, I wondered whether I was in for another passive couple of hours. I had just had dinner and I even fell asleep for an instant. Fortunately my wife nudged me. There was much of interest, after all. A grandmotherly woman, washing an old man who has been a stroke victim. She is a quiet woman. She goes to a clinic and is examined by a doctor. She goes home, a middle class, rather small apartment, where she provides room and board for her teenage grandson.

Scene by scene goes by, a bit of drama here and there. It is not too long before one realizes he is in the hands of a poet, hence the title, a poet filmmaker, a celebrator of the ordinary. There is no music except the music of life. Although the woman attends a poetry class, hoping to learn how to write a poem, there is little spoken poetry that is not rather banal.

It is not simply that a crime has been committed, that this film becomes so engrossing. It unfolds on many levels. There is, of course, simply the matter of allowing oneself to be absorbed in a foreign language and an Eastern culture. The story could not have been the same in the West, but I don't want to give too much away.

The woman wonders, how could her very own grandson have been involved in such a crime? Why will he not speak to her about it? She visits the various scenes involved. She goes to see the victim's mother, without telling the mother who she is.

No one else seems to be sensitive about the incident or the victim's family, perhaps because that family is a poor, fatherless one. Indeed, the only fathers we see in the film are attempting to cover up what happened. Grandmother herself seems quite insensitive about it; she is no heroine, just a rather ordinary woman just getting by.

But she wants to write a poem. She wants beauty in her life again. Somehow, beauty has gone away like her youth, and she may even be falling into Alzeimher's disease.

All of this and more unfolds like a masterpiece, a multitextured collage of many levels. And in the end, it is not disease or old age to which we must succumb, but simply heartbreak. At the end of her poetry class, she is the only one to have written a poem, and what a masterful, deeply moving story it tells. In the end she has become something so much greater than her ordinary, everyday self; I found it powerfully moving, powerfully affirming of life.

This is a beautiful, moving and disturbing film. As one watches it, the question arises why does the title give such prominence to poetry? Especially as the poetry class the main character follows doesn't seem to tie-in with the main plot lines. How do the circumstances surrounding an elderly woman in the early stages of dementia, who has to deal with a terrible crime committed by her grandson (who is in her charge), relate to poetry? Lee Chang-dong (the director, writer, producer of the film) has mentioned that two central inspirations for the film "Poetry" was whether poetry is dying and, also, whether film is dying. In my mind, these two questions raise two other ones: what is poetry, what is film? Poetry, the word, means making, creating something, usually out of nothing. The word is associated to the christian god in certain hymns, where the god is referred to as the poet of everything, of things visible and invisible. This point of view, I think, offers a useful approach to the main question hovering over this film. It doesn't come with an easy answer but definitely associates with poetry not the results but the actions of the main character. It remains open, ambivalent about the results: was the way she dealt with her grandson "correct", "just"? what exactly did she do in the end? As I see it, the film suggests that poetry is not in the end result but in the process of dealing with your life (problems, situations, friendships, etc) and how true is that way to your feelings, emotions, beliefs. So, if poetry (as art) is creation than this is not necessarily associated with verse or film; it is not associated with any end product but with the act of getting to the end product; and in that sense "poetry" can come about in any which way, irrespective whether it is classified or defined as making poetry, film, music, etc. In that sense, poetry can be found anywhere.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 17 reviews  4.3 out of 5 stars