Review: Poetry

National Poetry Month continues! And this week, I review a movie titled, appropriately enough, Poetry. It’s a South Korean film released in 2010 directed by the filmmaker and novelist Lee Chang Dong. The film centers on a grandmother, Mrs. Yang, living in a smallish Korean city where she raises her teenage grandson and works part-time as a maid and home health care aide. It’s a small, quiet life but things begin to change for her as three events converge. First, after noticing she’s regularly forgetting basic words, Mrs. Yang is diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Then on her way home from the doctor, she sees a poster advertising a poetry class at the local community center and decides to sign up. Finally, Mrs. Yang discovers that her seemingly typical, pimply, inarticulate teenage grandson is one of a gang of boys involved in regularly assaulting a girl at school. She discovers this only after the girl commits suicide by jumping off a bridge and the fathers of the other boys get together with Mrs. Yang to make a plan for how to protect their sons’ futures. 

The film follows her as she tries to continue on with regular life while simultaneously trying to write poetry for her class by dwelling on the beautiful things of the world and trying to understand and reconcile how her own grandson could be part of something so monstrous. Both efforts are confounded as her Alzheimer’s continues to creep up on her. 

 

One of the saddest scenes in the film takes place when Mrs. Yang travels to the country to find the dead girl’s mother and convince her not to go public with the reason for her daughter’s suicide. She walks out to the field where the mother is working and gets so distracted by the beauty of the scenery, that she forgets why she came in the first place. She has a pleasant chat with the mother and then leaves, only realizing as she’s walking away what she forgot to do. Too embarrassed to correct herself, she just keeps walking.

 

Mrs. Yang tries to write a single poem over the course of the entire film, and she pauses every time she sees something stereotypically poetic – birds in the trees near her apartment, flowers outside the restaurant where she plans with the other parents to pay off the mother of the dead girl, the rippling water of the river where the girl jumped in. But each time, she’s never able to get more than a line or two before realizing she isn’t really inspired by these things. 

Mrs. Yang wrestles with the morality of trying to pay off the mother of the dead girl rather than allowing her grandson to be accountable for his actions. As she is gently bullied by the other boys’ fathers, she then struggles with how to come up with her part of the payoff. Each parent is expected to chip in five million won or about 4500 hundred U.S. dollars. For a woman of her means, it might as well be five million U. S. dollars.

In the end, Mrs. Yang gets her share of the money, but it doesn’t save her grandson. She also finally writes a poem, but rather than giving her peace, it only seems to highlight the fact that her life is irrevocably different and that she can never go back to what it was.

The film is largely about waking up – to the world around you and to the people in your life. It is about understanding that real poetry is not in birds or flowers but in the discoveries we make about ourselves and others when we truly open our eyes. It is in the contradiction of finding that you can still love someone even when we hate what they’ve done.  

It is not a fast moving film. It lingers and takes its time in ways that most American movies never would. There are subtitles and cultural differences that will keep away casual viewers. But like poetry itself, the film Poetry is something that rewards the patient, open-minded viewer.