THE SLOW crushing of maternal love is a staple in Asian films. For instance, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother and now Poetry by Chang-dong Lee offer a compare-and-contrast exercise in approaches to such plots. Both Mother and Poetry concern a crime against a young girl committed by adolescents. In both cases, elderly women end up holding the bag.
In Poetry, Mija (Yun Jung-hie) is a 66-year-old lady, white-gloved and genteel, from a small city on the edge of the countryside. Her live-in grandson, whom she loves, was involved with a disgraceful crime. It will take big money—about $5,000 in American dollars—to get his name out of it. This is bad enough, but Mija has worse news coming. What seemed to be mild forgetfulness proves to be the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. These dramas overlap, but they don’t interfere with Mija’s whim to enroll in an adult-education poetry class.
She works her way up: first, little poems of appreciation to fruits and flowers, later, a Sharon Olds-style commemoration of a girl’s ordeal. The quality of Mija’s writing—piercing or clumsy but inspired?—is lost in translation. The quality may be immaterial, anyway. Poetry‘s main subject is a woman enduring pressure. To use a botanical metaphor, the stress on Mija causes a forced bloom.
Critics have already called Poetry a classic already, and there are times when it looks it. The appealingly crowded framing, the deftness with a landscape, creates high tension without manipulation. You can feel the exuberance in the students: a ribald policeman who likes silly puns or an unfaithful wife telling the class what she’s told no one before.
Some may weep watching Poetry. Others may feel a cold, hard fury at the smirking, dick-wielding men circling Mija. Even a feminist wrath disintegrates here because of the open, cryptic, even vague finish. By contrast, Yun Jung-hie’s embodiment of utter humility is believable, as are her choices to try to do something strong for once. Where director Chang-dong Lee takes the primal force of maternal love as something not to be tampered with, Poetry is melancholy, wondering at the limits of endurance and mercy.
Poetry
Unrated; 139 min.
