Poetry | Film Review

Story by Greg Bright 

| Published Apr 5, 2011

In writer/director Lee Chang-dong’s devastatingly brilliant film “Poetry,” a story that looks at what love and compassion really mean when facing the darker side of life, Yang Mija explores the process of composing poetry as it relates to her life.

For a film that deals with the discovery of a terminal illness and the generational gap of a grandmother and her grandson, it never devolves into sentimentality or melodrama. Helped along by Chang-dong’s decision to do without a film score, and Kim Hyunseok’s beautifully naturalistic cinematography, the actors are forced to tell the story themselves.

The brunt of this storytelling falls on actress Yoon Jeong-hee, in her first role since 1994, playing Yang Mija. Jeong-hee brings a gentleness to the character, without taking away her strength. She is an actress that knows subtlety is the key to great acting and never goes overboard in her performance. This allows the audience to begin to empathize with what is happening to her, even though it would be hard to believe anyone has gone through her situation.

Chang-dong, whose overwhelming philosophical questions have hurt his earlier films, is able to walk the fine line between the philosophical question of how to write poetry and the story of how a woman learns to write poetry, allowing the story to organically answer the question as opposed to forcing the question upon the story.

The film runs longer than most, 139 minutes, but Chang-dong and Jeong-lee create a film so realistic in its production, and packed with so much emotional force, that you won’t even notice. It is an incredible achievement that definitely deserves, and demands, a viewing.