Duality in Lee Chang-dong's POETRY
The following notes on Poetry were written by Josh Martin, PhD Student in the Communication Arts department at UW-Madison. Poetry will screen in a new DCP on Saturday, November 9 at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission is free.
By Josh Martin
“Beauty exists alongside ugliness, filth, and pain,” observes director Lee Chang-dong in a recorded introduction to his film Poetry (2010), which won the Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival. “This duality,” director Lee concludes, “is what I wanted to portray to the audience.” Such a stark duality is visible from the very first scene of the film, which begins with the images and sounds of rushing water as children play by a riverbank. A young child looks and sees a body drifting downstream, initially captured from afar in a long shot. This body – which appears to be that of a young woman, floating face down – continues to move closer and closer to the camera, encroaching on our view until its pallid color and visible lifelessness are even more glaringly apparent and difficult to witness.
The unexplained image of this body is juxtaposed with our introduction to Mija Yang (Yoon Jeong-hee, in a role written specifically for the longtime star of Korean cinema). Mija is a good-natured, somewhat scattered older woman, clad in a colorful floral outfit, whom we meet at a doctor’s appointment. Though ostensibly visiting for an arm ailment, Mija’s distracted disposition signals a broader disruption related to her failing memory. Despite this harbinger of a diagnosis to come, the early scenes in Poetry capture Mija’s daily life, in which she conducts her job as a caretaker for an aging man and attends to her indifferent grandson. Throughout this quotidian account, glimpses of something more troubling arise on the outer rim of the film’s orbit. As Mija chats on the phone, the unstable handheld camera departs her call to portray a woman screaming in grief in the hospital parking lot; later, we learn that a middle school girl died by suicide, a reminder of the grisly image that opened the film.
As Poetry progresses, these peripheral traces of tragedy shift to the dramatic center. The vaguely ominous atmosphere of suspicion and unease grows until it is finally revealed that Mija’s moody grandson was part of a group of young men who repeatedly raped this young girl over several months, eventually leading to her death. Lee recalls that Poetry takes inspiration from a terrible real-life incident in the town of Miryang-si, where a middle school girl was sexually assaulted by her classmates. The “weight of this event lingered with me,” Lee emphasizes, but “I knew I didn’t want to recount the story in a conventional manner.” Instead, Lee approaches this violence indirectly, presenting the echoes of this unseen trauma and following Mija as she tries to process her grandson’s actions.
Known concurrently for his work as a novelist, Lee Chang-dong has only directed six films in his career, but he has been a vital voice as Korean art cinema experienced an increasingly global reach. Though not strictly linked with the “slow cinema” tradition – the catch-all moniker for an arthouse approach inclined towards long takes and minimalistic storytelling – Lee has been associated with its stylistic parameters before. Rick Warner’s essay on the “slow thriller” describes Lee’s Burning (2018) as “a more glacially paced version of the East Asian revenge thriller,” while Daniel Dufournaud links the age-related decline of Poetry’s Mija with a broader slow style. Lee’s cinema demands a level of patience, a willingness to acclimate to its rhythms and accept, as Dufournaud suggests, “the value of slowing down and patiently observing.”
Crucially for the purposes of Poetry, slow cinema has occasionally been configured as “contemporary contemplative cinema,” a fitting label for a film that quite directly takes contemplation itself as its subject. In addition to Mija’s memory loss and her grandson’s complicity in this atrocity, the film’s third key narrative element concerns Mija’s newfound interest in poetry. She signs up for a class at a local cultural center, in which she learns techniques from the poet Kim Yong-taek. “The most important thing in life is seeing,” Kim emphasizes, insisting on the importance of perception, of being conscious of the world around us. The act of seeing, then, is configured by Kim as a pathway to feeling more deeply, to tapping into the possibilities of the poetic spirit. As Mija seeks to contemplate her own world, finding beauty in her tumultuous everyday life, Lee invites viewers to engage in their own contemplation, pondering the world of the film and its harrowing events.
Though Lee insists on a duality of conflicting emotions – a dialectic of violence and beauty, placidity and turmoil – the film never downplays the nauseating pain of its elided central event or its troubling implications. As Lee argues, Poetry puts pressure on the “purpose and significance of art” – on the viability of poetry itself – and its role in making sense of “the suffering around us.” The film features no shortage of moments that are difficult to stomach. When Mija gathers with the fathers of the other boys, these patriarchs can think only of the ramifications for their sons’ futures, offering crude comments on the girl, her family, and a dismissive attitude toward the gravity of this sexual violence. The despicable behavior of these men works in conjunction with Mija’s status as a poor, older woman to further clarify Lee’s commentary on class and gender, its critique of the violence that sparked the film’s genesis. In one of Poetry’s loveliest grace notes, Lee presents several sequences in which the attendees of Kim’s poetry class are captured in static, individual medium close-ups. In these shots, the relatively anonymous characters offer reflections on the most beautiful moments in their lives. The blissful memories recounted also generate great sadness for the characters, whether they detail the all-too-late emergence of a painful, forbidden romance, or the ecstasy of finally leasing an apartment after several miserable years in the city. “I don’t know if pain is beautiful,” Lee mused in an interview from the film’s release, “but I do wonder what beauty would mean without pain.” The central tension in Lee’s film reveals not so much a coexistence of contradictory emotions as it does a synthesis, extending from these poetic reminiscences to Mija’s own poem which concludes the film – a poem that emerges, as scholar Steve Choe writes, when Mija “affirms not only life’s beauty, but its ugliness, tragedy, and injustice” as well. As the product of contemplative introspection that nonetheless flowers from profound horror, Mija’s poetry, much like Lee’s film itself, probes the contrasts of sorrow and hope, beauty and pain.