by Allan Fish
(South Korea 2010 139m) DVD1/2
Aka. Shi
Drinking a glass of oblivion
p Lee Joon-dong d/w Lee Chang-dong ph Kim Hyun-seok ed Kim Hyun art Sihm Jiom-hui
Yun Jeong-hee (Yang Mija), Lee David (Jong Wook), Kim Hira (Mr Kang), Ahn Nae-sang (Kim Yong-tak, Kibum’s father), Park Myeong-sin (Agnes’ mother),
It was over a decade ago when Peppermint Candy hit screens with the force of the oncoming train about to run down its hero, a film that made many experts in oriental cinema hail a master of Korean film, one to take it into the new millennium with a sense of purpose. At the time, I was more sceptical; Candy was an excellent film, but it seemed formative, its director’s talent not yet fully grown. Its idea of a backwards narrative was more satisfactorily used in Memento the following year and its central protagonist was hard to care about. Yet Chang-dong’s film showed enough, even if his talent was embryonic then, to make one think a masterpiece was a possibility down the line.
In the intervening decade other Korean talents, Chan-wook, Ki-duk, Ji-woon and others have come onto the scene, but I always held out hope for Chang-dong. And then along came Poetry, floating up the stream of the collective cinematic consciousness like the body of the schoolgirl who is seen by kids playing by a river. And just as surely as we know it’s a body even before it’s confirmed, we know the river itself will become a motif. It transpires that the girl has committed suicide after being bullied and horrifically raped repeatedly, at first by two boys, then later as many as six. Five of the boys’ fathers try to band together to offer compensation to the grieved mother, with the school wanting to keep it out of the papers (the crime happened in a secluded science lab on campus) and the police unable to act until charges were made. The problem is that the sixth boy has no father and lives with his grandmother. (more…)