Often we struggle with articulating our lives—those things we see and feel, the ones that try to impress themselves upon us but that we feel incapable of experiencing in language. This process can become more intense as age allows experiences to mount but language grows ever more elusive.
Or maybe it’s just me.
South Korean director Lee Chang-dong focuses his latest effort on Mija (Yoon Jung-hee—appearing on the screen for the first time in 16 years) as she copes with the commonplace, the beautiful, and the horrific elements found in any life. In her mid-60s, Mija works as a housemaid for a stroke-addled man (Kim Hi-ra), bathing and feeding, cleaning and cooking. At home, she does some of the same for her grandson, Wook (Lee David), an incommunicative, thankless adolescent. Still wearing the remnants of her great beauty, Mija already appreciates grace and significance in her surroundings. But once enrolled in a neighborhood poetry class, she is challenged to turn her perspective into verse, to move beyond fragmentary observations and compose scenes from her life. The task is heavily freighted by her own early-stage Alzheimer’s and the revelation of her grandson’s dreadful crime, a serial gang raping of a Hee-Jin, a middle-school classmate who is driven to suicide after months of the abuse. It is her body that opens the film, floating down the river’s currents before being discovered by children playing on the bank.
The film could follow a familiar script: moral crisis serving as catalyst for dramatic evolution. But that isn’t Lee’s film or Mija’s journey. She takes one, it’s true: we watch her struggle with a grandson who shows not only no remorse but also no responsibility for his actions, with a group of fathers focused on keeping their sons out of the news and out of prison rather than on righting the wrong, and with an employer who asks more of her than might be covered by her job description.
As her poetry instructor gently nudges Mija to see the world carefully, her pursuit of poetry, first undertaken casually as an amusement in her fairly prosaic life, grows into a passion that changes how she moves through her surroundings. Naively, she asks of him: “When does a ‘poetic inspiration’ come?” When he replies that she must beg for it, searching it out, she asks again “Where must I go?” Mija’s notebook accompanies her through the days, and she seeks poetic inspiration inward and outward, as refuge and guide for these uncharted waters. From passion, poetry slowly offers transcendence, a movement beyond life’s bluntness that even Mija succumbs to as she tries to raise restitution for her grandson’s crime.
Unadorned though far from barren, the film follows Mira’s discoveries as she tries to forge a new kind of linguistic relationship, one that “really sees” the world in a way that few around her seem capable of or even interested in noticing. Poetry does not insist on a simple cause-and-effect between poetry and true vision, love and morality. Nor does it refuse one. Lee effectively leaves it to the viewer to infer their reading, something very few authors/filmmakers can achieve.
The film ends back in the poetry class; Mija is absent but has left flowers and a poem in her stead, the only student who has risen to instructor’s challenge to write a poem by the end of the course. Mija’s poem, titled “Agnes’ Song” (Agnes being Hee-jin's Christian name) is introduced by the teacher, begun in Mija’s voice but soon overtaken by the voice of Hee-jin. The poem’s final lines read:
I bless you
Before crossing the black river
With my soul’s last breath
I am beginning to dream
A bright sunny morning
Again I awake
Blinded by the light and meet you
Standing by me
The camera’s path joins Mija with Hee-jin, walking across the bridge a final time, looking us in the eye before descending into the waters below. In this final gesture, the film makes less tentative a connection between Mija and Hee-jin, their lives, fates, and most importantly, their poetry.
