Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter And... Spring
(Bom Yeoreum
Gaeul Gyeoul Geurigo Bom)
South Korea/Germany (2003) 103mins
Programme
Notes
Four seasons on a floating monastery offer a sharp lesson in life in this ravishing
Korean drama
Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-Duk has been a regular fixture on the international festival circuit since the late 1990s, with a series of brutally offbeat outings. Full of violent imagery, painterly cinematography and a desire to chart life among South Korea's dispossessed, films like Bad Guy, The Isle and Birdcage Inn have taken arthouse cinema into the gutter with breathtaking results.
In the torturously over-titled Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... And Spring, the writer-director fashions a surprisingly mature, beautifully poetic drama that distils all his previous themes. The result is an exquisite morality tale, a visual feast that's infused with a Buddhist outlook on life, love, and man's place in the universe.
A meditation on the cyclical nature of life, this is a confidently minimalist, impressionistic film. Water laps gently at the sides of the floating monastery platform; wind chimes tinkle; the characters perform their religious rituals in solemn silence; the steady gaze of a golden Buddha looks out over the lake. Still, the images that Kim Ki-Duk conjures are shockingly bizarre, like the feverish visions of an eastern Magritte: a man writes 'shut' on three pieces of paper and glues them over his eyes, nose and mouth, a cat's tail is dipped in ink and used to pen a sutra, a baby crawls along the icy surface of the lake.
Verdict
Haunting, serene, beautiful. Kim Ki-Duk has created a ravishing visual treat
and a quietly understated religious experience.
filmfour.com
Kim Ki-Duk has made a name in Korea as an uncompromising director, frequently
taking as his protagonists criminals and prostitutes, marginal and self-harming
- as in Birdcage Inn (1998), Bad Guy (2001) and Samaritan Girl, for which he
recently won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Beauty jars with brutality
in his notorious film The Isle (2000), in which a fugitive and a prostitute
meet at a fishing lake. It is marked by melancholy waterscapes and unflinchingly
grim incident, in particular two gruesome attempts at suicide by ingesting fish-hooks.
Spring, Summer... might seem an anomaly in this oeuvre: it traces the education of a young monk from childhood to old age, each episode illustrated by a different season. Korean critics welcomed it as a significant departure for Kim, with its steadily lyrical visual palette and subdued sense of renewal. But beyond its poetic composition and references to Buddhist mysticism, it deals with the same alienated and marginal characters struggling to attain some kind of peace.
Even more than in The Isle, Kim distils sublime images of the natural world, aided by his conceit of the changing seasons. Spring is succeeded by a spectacular autumn of pink and orange leaves and the frozen beauty of the lake in winter. But nature here, however radiant, is also unyielding and challenging with its impacted ice and dauntingly steep hills. The childhood scenes that bookend the film reinforce a view of humanity's essentially cruel impulses that can only be curbed by constant vigilance. The boy's innocently destructive energies in the first episode see him tie stones to small struggling creatures, consumed by gap-toothed chuckles at his hampered victims. Sex too is driven by animal energies, so that the adolescent monk can't help himself copping a feel of a girl who is convalescing at the monastery.
In winter, as the season attains the same blue-grey as the monk's robes, the
now middle-aged protagonist (played with coiled grace by Kim himself) takes
sole responsibility for his life. This section attracts Kim's most striking
cinematic gestures. The monk's rigorous martial exercises, bare-chested on the
ice, are arrested in freeze-frame, seen at a distance or from above in an arresting
choreography of awakening. His violent thaw is accompanied by raw vocal music,
while here too is the film's one abrupt, unanticipated death, in which a mother
abandoning her baby loses her footing and falls into an ice hole as she scurries
away.
Each of the film's seasonal sections is announced by the monastery gates laboriously creaking open and reinforcing the suggestion of a sanctuary for damaged souls. However, the grimly truncated anecdotes of Kim's earlier work are balanced by a generously nuanced sense of time passing. Incidents gather resonance between episodes, so that the monks collect leaves in the first episode for a medicine that we see prepared in the second. In the small monastery, poised and floating on the lake, the painted wood, simple altar and bird-shaped wind chimes accrue a poignant familiarity over the decades of the narrative.
Kim's withholding, wounded characters typically stint on dialogue. They speak with sullen reluctance, and attempts at self-expression are more likely to be sawn-off lunges into violence or self-harm. Although the elderly monk in Spring, Summer... delivers several stern pronouncements, his pupil assimilates the lessons at his own anguished pace, over decades. The film's restricted vocal expressiveness encourages startling images - a woman preserving anonymity by winding a violet scarf around her face, the fabric stained with tears as she prepares to abandon her baby; the old monk's patient ritual suicide, in which he sticks small squares of cloth with the inscription "shut" over his eyes, mouth and ears, and is consumed by fire as the lake disappears into autumn mist. Although not as gut-wrenching or politically pugnacious as some of his previous work, Kim's film allows a sense of moral renewal unclouded by sentimentality and without blurring his remarkable cinematic idiom.
David Jays
British
Film Institute
Cast and crew
Directed by …. Kim Ki-duk
Written by …. Kim Ki-duk
Cast (in credits order)
Yeong-su Oh .... Old Monk (as Young-soo Oh)
Ki-duk Kim .... Adult Monk
Young-min Kim .... Young Adult Monk
Jae-kyeong Seo .... Boy Monk
Yeo-jin Ha .... The Girl
Jong-ho Kim .... Child Monk
Jung-young Kim .... The Girl's Mother
Dae-han Ji .... Detective Ji
Min Choi .... Detective Choi
Ji-a Park .... The Baby's Mother
Min-Young Song .... The Baby
Original Music by …. Ji-woong Park
Cinematography by ….. Dong-hyeon Baek
Film Editing by …. Ki-duk Kim
Costume Design by …. Min-Hee Kim
Produced by …. Karl Baumgartrier
…. Seung-Jae Lee