POETRY (Lee Chang-dong). 139 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (September 30). See listing. Rating: NNNN
Following his exceptional 2007 drama Secret Sunshine, writer/director Lee Chang-dong delivers another understated, delicate film that delves deeply into one woman’s inner life and also manages to capture a sense of the community around her. It’s a work of rich, subtle pleasures that finds transcendence in the strangest places.
Poetry stars Yun Jeong-hie as Mija, a Korean grandmother who takes a poetry class to sharpen her mind and finds herself increasingly flummoxed by her instructor’s requirement to write one meaningful poem.
If that were the only thing on Mija’s mind, she’d probably cope, but there are other, weightier issues to deal with – including her grandson’s distressing connection to the suicide of a teenage classmate, the advances of an elderly stroke victim for whom Mija works as a caregiver and financial pressures.
Lee’s camera follows his heroine through her days as she searches for grace – and, in at least one case, finds it – in an increasingly cold and alienating world. There are incidents of considerable importance, but the film’s only interested in them as far as they affect Mija’s progress. Her inner journey is far more important than plot points.
Poetry is an interesting counterpoint to another recent Korean drama, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother. Both are about aging women facing awful truths about a child or grandchild, but while Mother pays off in a terrible irony, Poetry reaches for something warmer and more humane.
