Spring Summer Fall Winter and Spring Again Mexitli
Rarely has a moving picture this simple moved me this deeply. I feel equally if I could review it in a paragraph, or talk over information technology for hours. The Due south Korean film "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Wintertime … and Bound" (2003) is Buddhist, simply information technology is also universal. Information technology takes identify within and around a small business firm floating on a small raft on a small lake, and within that compass, it contains life, religion, growth, dear, jealousy, hate, cruelty, mystery, redemption … and nature. Besides a dog, a rooster, a cat, a bird, a snake, a turtle, a fish and a frog.
The one-room business firm serves the function of a hermitage, or a monk's cell. As the film opens, it is occupied by a monk (Oh Young Soo) and a boy (Seo Jae Kyung), learning to be a monk. The monk rises, wakes the male child, bows and prays to a figure of the Buddha, and knocks on a hollow bowl that sends a comfortable resonance out into the forest. We gather that the daily routine rarely changes.
Before I describe the action whatever further, let me ameliorate set the scene. The lake is surrounded on all sides by steep walls of forest or stone, broken here and there by ravines. It is approached through ii large, painted wooden doors, which swing open to introduce each season of the movie, and frame the floating house. These doors do not keep anyone out, because i would only have to walk around them to notice the residual of the shoreline open and free. But they are always respected.
Information technology is the same inside the business firm. The master and the boy sleep on pallets on either side of the room. At the human foot of each sleeping area is a door. The area is otherwise open to the room, and e'er visible. But when the monk awakens the boy, he is careful to open the door and enter, instead of simply calling out to him or stepping around the door. Several people will occupy these sleeping spaces during the movie, and they will always care for the door equally if it had a practical function … except sometimes.
What practise nosotros acquire from these doors that close nothing out or in? They are not symbols, I think, only lessons. They teach the inhabitants that information technology is of import to follow custom and tradition, to go the aforementioned way that others have gone, to respect what has been left for them.
Perchance embedded cultural ideas make this idea persuasive to us. We have a formulation, idealized and romanticized, of the aboriginal wisdom of the Orient. We take the notion of a monk living in seclusion for decades — meditating in a mount cavern, for example. If a modern Westerner, an American or German lived in solitude on a raft in a lake with a small kid whom he expected to continue there after his death, how would that seem to us? It would seem unwholesome. It would seem equally strange to Kim Ki Duk, its director, I suspect.
But that kind of thinking never invades our minds while watching a film like this. We fall easily into its premise. We are moved and comforted by its story of timelessness, of the transcendence of the eternal. To live on a lake raft through a common cold winter would not exist pleasant. In this moving-picture show information technology is a passage on the cycle of the seasons. The film it its beauty and serenity becomes seductive and fascinating. Nosotros have the lake as the center of beingness.
Its shore is reached by an old just beautifully painted rowboat. The boy often goes ashore to collect herbs, which his chief teaches him about. 1 solar day the boy rows to shore and plays in some little ponds. Inspired to mischief, he ties a cord around a fish, and a small-scale stone to the other cease, to brand it difficult for the fish to swim. He burbles with laughter. Then he plays the same cruel play tricks on a frog and a snake. He does not know that the chief has followed and is watching him.
And we exercise not know how the primary got to shore without the rowboat, although more than than once, he seems to exist able to do that. The rowboat seems to moor itself adjacent to an aboriginal tree in the lake, without tether or ballast, and on one occasion, seems to float toward the primary at his behest, but there is no hint earlier that the gunkhole returned for the main. And the movie makes no point at all of the master's inexplicable materialization; some viewers may not notice it. It is at that level of mysticism where yous wonder if you really did see something out of the corner of your heart.
The side by side morning when the boy awakens, he finds a stone tied to his dorsum. The master orders him to render to shore and free the fish, the frog and the serpent. "If 1 of them has died, you will always carry that rock in your heart."
Terminate of jump. I will not spoil the picture's further unfolding, other than to note that when a girl comes to the hermitage to be cured, she and the boy (now a boyfriend) fall in love. The monk thinks sexual practice might exist function of her cure, but warns of anger: "Lust awakens the desire to possess. And that awakens the intent to murder."
There is always an animal on the raft to keep the monk company (the dog is glimpsed only briefly at the beginning). The monk feeds them, pets the cat considering it is the requirement of cats to be petted and otherwise simply shares the space, as he does with his student. The lake, the raft, the business firm, the animals, the forest, are in that location for them, and will be there afterward them, and the monk accepts the use of them.
The moving-picture show is by Kim Ki Duk, or in the Korean style, Ki-duk Kim, born in 1960. We see him briefly at the end, playing another monk who has come to the island. I first became aware of his work at Sundance 2000, where he showed "The Island," probably the most viscerally vehement picture I have ever seen. No, it doesn't have explosions or shootings, but what it does with fish hooks is unspeakable.
Strange that the same managing director made both films. I note that Korean directors take an inclination toward extreme violence and frank sexuality, although it is usually represented every bit beliefs, in a long shot, instead of being insisted upon in closeup. The nudity and sexuality in "Spring…" is context, non subject.
There must be something near floating isolation that fascinates this director. "The Island" was well-nigh fishermen each occupying a small floating angling shack on a large lake, their simply contact with shore an unspeaking woman who rows out to them and supplies food, drinkable, supplies and prostitutes. His "The Bow" (2005) involves a starting state of affairs something like "Jump…" An old human being lives on his boat with a girl he has raised since infancy. He expects (as the monk manifestly expects of his student) that the arrangement will go along indefinitely. In both films, a visitor the aforementioned age as the protege comes aboard and introduces the possibility of carnality.
Kim Ki Duk avoids 1 practice: In his films that I have seen (as well including "Three-Atomic number 26," 2004, not a golf game motion-picture show), he doesn't brand his message manifest. There is piffling or no dialogue, no explanations, no speeches with messages. He descends upon lives that have long since taken their grade. If conflict comes, his characters will in some way bring information technology upon themselves, or within themselves. That causes the states to pay closer attention. How junior a film like "Bound…" would be if it supplied a rival monk or visiting tourists or land developers. The protagonist in this motion-picture show is life, and the antagonists are time and change. Nor is it that unproblematic, because to be alive, you must come to terms with both of those opponents.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the picture show critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring (2003)
103 minutes
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Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/spring-summer-fall-winter_and-spring-2003
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