Butler's Cinema Scene

“POETRY”  My rating : B

139 minutes | No MPAA rating

Beauty and brutality, poetry and pessimism are uneasy neighbors in Lee Chang-dong’s “Poetry,” a character study about an elderly woman whose rosy view of life is shattered by the casual cruelty of the modern world.

Mija (Yun Jung-hee, Korea’s greatest actress, who came out of 16 years of retirement to take this role) is a sixtysomething widow rearing her teenage grandson. She lives off a pension and the money she earns bathing and cleaning up after a cranky stroke victim.

Yun Jung-hee in "Poetry"

Once a great beauty, Mija takes girlish pleasure in being told how pretty she still is. In fact she’s flighty and shallow and — perhaps because her looks have always seen her through — naively upbeat.

That’s about to change.

In “Poetry’s” foreboding opening shot we see a young girl’s corpse drifting down a bucolic river. Turns out she’s a classmate of Mija’s grandson Wook (Da-wit Lee), a spoiled, kvetching oaf who never acknowledges his grandmother’s efforts on his behalf.

Mija’s world is turned upside down when she learns that the dead girl committed suicide after months of sexual abuse by Wook and his friends.

Now the fathers of the other boys, desperate to keep a lid on a scandal that could ruin their sons’ futures, propose bribing the dead girl’s mother to keep the case out of the courts. Mija is expected to contribute a sum of money virtually unattainable for a woman in her situation.

“Poetry” contrasts the old lady’s desperate search for cash against her efforts to write a poem for an adult ed class she has impulsively enrolled in. The teacher admonishes his students to open themselves up to simple beauty, to regard an sheet of white paper as “a world of pure potential, a world before creation…”

The tension between Mija’s poetic approach to life and the grim reality gives “Poetry” its quiet power.

Writer/director Lee takes an unhurried, languid approach to his material, and with a running time of 139 minutes he tests the patience of his audience.

But Yun’s performance — an astonishingly subtle portrait of a woman going though radical late-in-life changes — is so compelling that we’re sucked in and left reeling by what this woman is willing to do to save her unworthy grandson.

| Robert W. Butler