"Poetry" (2010)

By one account, poetry equates to justice: "poetic justice" after all. And as a corean director, Lee Chang-dong conceives it that way. Why "as a corean director"? Let's look at the evidence. It is probable that the director happened to watch Bong Joon-ho's Mother, and he was intrigued by the affect. A tragedy involving the suicide of a 16-year-old girl, its persimmon core masked by layers of doubt and uncertainty. (Interestingly, Lee Chang-dong must have also watched any of the numerous kidnap & vengeance films made in recent years by his compatriots -- most notably by Park Chan-wook -- and made in turn his own take on the genre, Secret Sunshine -- only this time eliding or skewing the vengeance-served-cold part and giving us instead an inversion: the portrait of a greek heroine maddened by grief too weighty, too monstrous to overcome any facile bloodlust.)

How does one understand the inner cosmos of a 16-year-old girl, one moreover who suffers the fate of the condemned and terminally neglected? Mother gave us only a glimpse; Lee Chang-dong betters that film and gives us an elegy -- one focused as much on the disappearance of the mother/grandmother as it is focused on the reappearance of the victimized girl. But this only occurs at the end, bringing the film to a full circle, back at the point from where it began: the image of a dead body -- the girl's body, dressed in her school uniform -- floating down the river, face-down, and as it comes slowly toward the camera and is momentarily stopped by the river bank, the film's title, elegantly typed in hangeul -- 시/Poetry -- fades in as the image of Ophelia fades out. Why does Lee Chang-dong make this decision, raising the sight of a floating corpse to the value of poetry? (One answer, for example, can be found in the cinematic majesty of Rimbaud's Le dormeur du val, in which we discover the deadness of a young soldier asleep in the valley only after we have perceived the angelic nature of his repose.) Another answer formulates the central message of the film: poetry is the opportunity to make things right. To rectify wrongs. To re-balance the moral disturbances wrought by human injustice on the natural order, the true order of death and life in their natural cadence. The girl's body -- faceless at first, and only gradually revealed to us through pictures, and finally brought to vivid life through a reminiscence of her lived experience in her final hours, as Mija's voice, as she recites her elegy, begins to melt into and finally become the lost, unheard voice of the unfortunate suicide in her own body -- is resurrected through poetry; she is brought back to life in the empathy that poetry channels into the world, an empathy that sounds depths and uncovers lost traces.

While implicitly we are given a critique of the homosocial order that attempts to get rid of scandals -- if only to maintain, as it were, the status quo of "letting boys be boys" and getting on with it -- explicitly Lee Chang-dong brings our attention to the constant pressure and bereavement that men subject Mija to (not just her grandson, but also the fathers of her grandson's friends, who all seem to fulfill a vicious circle of Old Boy sexual politics, where fathers protect the boys who will grow up to be their fathers, an endless socializing process). Mija's decision to turn her own grandson in to the police (so very unlike the resolution of Bong Joon-ho's more cynical Mother!) allows her to compose her elegy to the girl suicide -- so that her sacrifice of her grandson comes to coincide with the liberating act of composing a poem: two acts of justice that restore natural order (i.e. the apparition of beauty) to a landscape torn by an Ophelia-in-flowers and a litany of unanswered grievances left in her wake. The balance which is attained by the stream of reflective images that engulf us (indeed reduces us to tears) at the end is something which can be glibly described as "Confucian" -- because its timely measurement, its sense of adequation, its incredible ability to reach equilibrium through tangential but harmonious reasoning, reminds me of several Confucian tenets... "Justice above all..."

Finally, poetry -- as philosophy more so than art -- comes to represent the power which  memory and recollection have upon our griefs and losses: the lost memory of the girl who had drowned herself comes back to haunt us in the final minutes -- because her voice has by then emerged as poem. If we are to examine the onset of Mija's alzheimer's condition -- an important focus of the film's plot -- the value of poetry as collective memory, as empathy achieved through recollection, strikes us as the proper chord in a song as much about forgetting the past as it is about remembering the neglected and unremembered victims of time.