Dir. Lee Chang-dong, South Korea, 2010, 139 mins, in Korean with subtitles
Cast: Yun Junghee, Kim Hira
Review by Carol Allen
Korea’s leading actress, Yun Junghee, came out of retirement to play the lead in this film. Mija, a woman in her sixties, lives with her sulky teenage grandson Wok, as her daughter, Wok’s mother, has disappeared from the scene. Mija makes a meagre living caring for an elderly man Kang (Kim), who is paralysed by a stroke, but she still dresses and indeed tackles life itself with flair, elegance and eccentricity. She enrols in a local poetry class in an effort to be able to express her feelings about her life. When she discovers that she is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s – information which she keeps to herself – and then that her grandson has been involved in the rape of a local schoolgirl, which has led to the girl’s suicide, it is her poetry class which gives her the strength to deal with all this and ultimately to write her poem.
And that is the story. What holds it together is the performance of its leading actress. There are some strong scenes in the film, most notably between Mija and the fathers of the other boys involved in the rape, who are determined to buy off the victim’s mother and expect Mija to make a financial contribution she can’t afford. Frustratingly no-one ever confronts the boys about their crime – the only interest of the school and the families appears to be to hush the matter up. And there is what for some may be a startling scene of a sexual encounter between two people well past the first flush of youth. Mija’s poetry is very Eastern in style – lines like “The apricot throws itself to the ground. It is crushed and trampled for its next life” and the pace is very leisurely for a Western audience. At 139 minutes the film seems over long and the ending is distinctly enigmatic. But it is definitely worth seeing for the still beautiful and mesmerising Yun Junghee.
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