(Ed. Note: Originally published at Image Facts.)
Quite possibly the best filmed incarnation of Buddhist ideology,Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, is a transcendent and visually poetic ode to one of Eastern mysticism’s core doctrines. An old monk and a young boy live together in a one room temple that floats in the middle of a lake nestled picturesquely in a remote emerald valley. Quite ambitiously, the film chronicles the growth of this charming little boy to his wayward adulthood staged through the transition of the seasons over time from Spring all the way back to Spring. Through a narrative tension that stands in stark contrast to the minimalist environment of the temple’s mystical geography, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Springmoves us through volumes of spiritual dialogue without us really being aware of it.
One of the images that sums up this tone poem to the circularity of all things is the temple itself. This temple is one open room split into three spaces by two freestanding doors facing each other in the middle of the room. The space between these two doors is where the few that live or visit there kneel and pray to the emblems of divinity that inhabit the temple. Anyone in the temple simply pretends that these doors are the only way to enter the other “rooms” of the temple, by simply agreeing to visualize two walls. When this tacit rule is violated by the young monk’s desire for a young girl that is sleeping on “the other side,” we begin to come into contact with the gravity of the temple’s fragile architecture. His rejection of the patterns of behavior modeled by the elder monk lead to awful tragedy.
Kim seems to have a fascination with parabolic nature of film. Many of the scenes in his films are long, wordless sequences through which we actually experience the spiritual sensibilities he is representing. We follow the little boy as he ties rocks to a fish and a frog and learns why that is such a horrible thing to do. We watch him as a teenager discovering what love is, having seen a girl of his own age for the first time. Towards the end of the film, Kim decides to take a page from Herzog’s book and forces us to sit through a feat of incredible physical endurance. In this case though, Kim out-Herzogs Herzog (as if that were possible) and literally steps in to suffer for his art. I didn’t know that Kim was actually playing the part of the adult monk while I was watching it, but the suffering he endures in this scene would be oddly analogous to Gibson having played Caviezel’s role in The Passion of the Christ. There is something emblematic about Kim’s presence as both director and directed.
Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall…and Spring is a great example of film as a spiritual exercise. It isn’t a Western spirituality, and Kim’s beautiful apology for the circularity of existence may strike one as lacking some key explanations when it comes full circle. But the film is rich with tones of transcendence. At the very least, it is good to see such great cinematography put to use as a language of mysticism. Like the door, the film becomes a space whose walls and distinctions are only apparent, though we are compelled to allow them to obtain in our senses.