This week, we welcome a guest contributor to Filmwell, Stephen Lamb. Today, he takes a look at the new film by Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong.
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Poetry is a summons to pay attention, an invitation to look closer at the world around us. In her wonderful little book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, professor of English at Westmont College, exhorting her readers to “practice poetry,” offers us this thought for consideration:
The sustained gaze required to find the adequate word engages us in contemplation and reminds us of the worthiness of what is given to us to witness.
The new film from Korean director Lee Chang-dong, aptly-named Poetry, extends this call to attentiveness beyond the books we read and the way we take in what life offers us amid the daily grind – if it can still be called “daily grind” when we learn to look at it poetically — to the movies we watch.
The story, which was awarded best screenplay at Cannes last year, focuses our attention on a grandmother, Min, (played by Yun Jung-hee, a popular South Korean actresses of the 60’s and 70’s who came out of retirement to play this role, her first in over fifteen years), and her grandson (Da-wit Lee), a frustratingly disrespectful teenager who lives with her.
Worried about a numbness in her arm, Min goes to the doctor, where she is instead diagnosed as being in the first stages of Alzheimer’s, the doctor gently telling her that this is why she has had trouble remembering words recently. Unsure of what to do with this information, she decides to ignore it, telling her daughter on the phone later that day the doctor said she was in great health — the same daughter she tells others repeatedly is her best friend, that they share everything.
After leaving the hospital, she sees a poster at the bus stop advertising a poetry class, and, maybe as a way of ignoring the Alzheimer’s diagnosis, maybe as a way of pushing back against it, of declaring that she is not too old to learn, she decides to sign up for the class. In this, she reminds me very much of my own grandmother, with whom I lived for a couple years, when she tells one friend after another some variation of, “I have the blood of a poet. I’ve always loved flowers and said odd things.” Two essential traits, apparently, of any good poet.
Arriving at the community center where the class is to be held, she finds the teacher beginning the class by holding up an apple, asking the students how many times they’ve seen one before. Ten times? A thousand? No, he says, you’ve never seen an apple before. You’ve never really looked at one, you’ve never held an apple up to the light and watched how the afternoon sun soaks into the skin.
For those familiar with Father Robert Farrar Capon and his masterful blend of theology, food, and cooking in The Supper of the Lamb, it is impossible here not to be reminded of his “first session,” wherein he spends a full chapter instructing the reader of the benefits of setting aside an hour to cut up an onion. “Admittedly, spending an hour in the society of an onion may be something you have never done before,” he writes. “You feel, perhaps, a certain resistance to the project. Please don’t. As I shall show later, a number of highly profitable members of the race have undertaken it before you. Onions are excellent company.”
He continues:
The fit, the colors, the smell, the tensions, the tastes, the textures, the lines, the shapes are a response, not to some forgotten decree that there may as well be onions as turnips, but to His present delight — His intimate and immediate joy in all you have seen, and in the thousand other wonders you do not even suspect. With Peter, the onion says, Lord, it is good for us to be here. Yes, says God. Tov. Very good.
It is not, of course, an easy thing to truly pay attention, and even then, as Min quickly reminds us, “apples are better for eating than for looking at,” a decision she arrives at after holding up an apple and turning it around in her hand one afternoon, trying to really see it, trying to find inspiration for a poem, before taking a big bite out of it.
I’ve left out of this review much discussion of the central conflict of the film, Min’s discovery of a stomach-turning act committed by her grandson and his friends and her mostly internal struggle to decide how to respond, a struggle we glimpse through her desire to write poetry, the way she looks at flowers or the leaves on a tree outside her apartment, her need to create space for reflection. Saying much more about this part of the story would only detract from the viewing experience, so I’ll just say that the last ten minutes or so offered one of the more satisfying conclusions to a story that I’ve seen on the big screen in the last couple of years. Min’s struggle to understand what happened and what should be done and the decisions she makes throughout the film become even more noteworthy when one takes into account they ways they rub against societal expectations and rules in her search for what is true and right.
Returning for a moment to Robert Farrar Capon’s book, I’d like to offer one more quotation that came to mind while watching Poetry, a connection that is not explicitly found in the film but one that I came away with, a way of explaining the decisions Min makes, a way to explain the work that poetry does in our lives.
Between the onion and the parsley, therefore, I shall give the summation of my case for paying attention. Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God’s image for nothing.