"Spring, Summer, Winter, Autumn
and . . . Spring"
(some seasonal thoughts)
There are movies that primarily induce thought rather than feeling or (in the case of your garden-variety action flick) a physical revving-up in the viewer. This Korean film evokes, at first, a feeling of bemused wonderment, a sweet willingness to feel both overwhelmed by beauty and filled with mystification.
And then you start to think. You start to ask questions (beware: spoilers ahead, as usual in my reviews), and the questioning process continues to reverberate while remembered images flit through the mind. Oddly, I find the questioning itself rather calm and ordered, as opposed to the usual boisterous flurrying of my thinking process when it's been strongly stimulated. It's as if the fragmentary visuals (the monastery floating, the quietly moving rowboat with the big, blossoming flower painted on its floor, the strange painted doors that open to water on both sides, the faces obscured by tearstained paper or cloth, the fog on the mountains) act on me as the characters carved and painted into the decking by the young man act to soothe his spiritual turmoil.
This film leaves a lasting impression, although the overall framework is deceptively simple: the seasons of a man's growth to maturity succeed each other, the cycles of life rolling gradually round to a new beginning.
An old monk teaches a child in rural isolation (spring), but when a listless young girl is brought to the old man for a cure, the young man falls in lust with her and runs away to the "world of men" to be with her (summer). The runaway comes back a fugitive, tormented by having killed his wife in a fit of jealous passion, and is calmed by the old man so that he can be arrested, peacefully, by two policemen; after which the old monk terminates his own life (Autumn).
Finally the young man, matured by years in prison and hardened by physical discipline (or maybe that's the other way around?), returns to take his dead master's place (winter). He accepts a baby left with him by an anonymous woman (who then dies under the ice of the lake) -- but not before he sets himself the grueling ask of dragging a religious statuette to a nearby mountaintop from which it overlooks the lake and the monastery from afar.
Throughout, animals make appearances suggesting symbolic meanings: a frog and a fish for childishly unreflective activity, a dog for playfulness, a rooster for youthful lustiness, a cat for a scholarly maturity (? or for predatory selfishness?), a turtle for I'm not sure what — endurance? —, and snakes for the cyclical nature of life, death, and rebirth (presumably also the idea of the reincarnation of the soul unhoused by death).
The isolated natural setting reminded me of an idea that I came across years ago in writings about Zen Buddhism, about how living in society is appropriate to a young man, but that in middle age he should withdraw into meditation to prepare himself for death (no suggestion was made that this path is open to women, by the way; they are apparently expected to keep things running while men withdraw to seek spiritual enlightenment -- a typical sexist trope in all the major religions; sigh).
This apparent narrative simplicity, limpid as the lake's surface, is deceptive. Questions persist, turning and shifting in my mind: why do the gates at the boat landing open to water on both sides? Why does everyone in the little building keep using the interior doors to go in and out of spaces that are not otherwise delineated by any sort of partition? What about the way the monastery comfortably holds many (four people at one point) while often appearing from without to be no bigger than a modest country two-holer? Moreover, at times it appears to float freely about on the lake, spinning in slow, stately circles instead of being tethered out in the middle of the water (where all the distance shots from above show it). Why do the rooster and the cat end up back on land, each one completely alone, in the shoreline forest?
Who is the mother who gives up her child at the end, that she must hide her face from the young monk? What woman would he recognize who would mean something to him? It can't be the girl who was his lover at the monastery years ago when he was just a boy; he went to jail for murdering her.
Unless we have wrongly assumed that she was the lover he killed, when in fact that was a different woman — all we really know about the crime itself is from a headline on a piece of newspaper, translated as "Man Kills Wife, Flees". If he married (and murdered) someone other than the girl of the "summer" episode, then this young mother could be that girl, bringing another man's child to what she remembers as a place of healing, safety and love.
What is the significance of her falling through the hole in the ice as she hastens away — accident, retribution, fate? Immediately afterward, the returned monk takes that punishing walk up into the mountains, carrying a religious statue and dragging a heavy milestone that is tied to his waist with rope. Perhaps he has been reminded of the woman he killed and is demonstrating his old master's rule that the being for whose death you are willfully responsible is carried in your heart ever after, as a heavy stone, no matter whether anyone else punishes you for your deed or not.
Or is he expressing remorse for the fact that merely by living — by needing water, so that he chopped the hole in the ice through which the mother then fell to her death — he necessarily causes the deaths of others, as we all do continually whether we are aware of it or not? Sorrow, in other words, for a dark, central fact of physical life: that life consumes life in order to persist?
Yet isn't it the stance of Buddhism that this is to be accepted, like all things? Then why such extravagantly expressive grief?
Startlingly, I've read that the film's writer-director, Kim Ki-Duk, is himself not a Buddhist but a Christian, and that the movie can be read (and is perhaps intended) as a critique of Buddhism.
The old monk shows wisdom any westerner can readily recognize: he refrains from intervening to prevent the boychild's adventures with cruelty and sex — how else is the boy to learn except to make his own mistakes and suffer the consequences? The old monk severely corrects the young man's attempt to close down his own young life prematurely — by a kind of meditative suicide — meant as an escape from those lessons instead of learning them. When the police trail the murderer to the monastery, the old monk knows how to calm all three of his visitors in order to prevent further violence.
But the old monk's teaching is a failure — in the sense that it doesn't prevent the young man's destructive adventures in the "world of men". In fact all the teaching seems to do is to perpetuate itself, from one monk to another, having no effect in the world beyond the lake. At the end the cycle is beginning again, presumably to take the same course — instruction, infraction, punishment, withdrawal and atonement, instruction of another.
Judging by his actions away from the monastery, the young man might as well have been raised by Satan-worshiping drug addicts. He appeared in that "world of men", killed a woman out of jealous possessiveness, and then disappeared again, leaving society the poorer by the dead young woman's life at the very least. Any slum-raised thug might have come and gone and left the same impression.
Only at the isolated lake are wisdom, detachment, and virtue operative, and sometimes they are questionable even there. Why is it good and wise for the old monk to accept the months-long presence of the young woman when what she's likely to get out of her affair with the younger man is a bastard child, a source of shame and hardship for her? Is he cynical enough to keep her there so that she can be healed by seducing the young monk, but naive enough to imagine that the affair will have no effect on his pupil?
The Western criticism that Buddhism is at bottom a deeply selfish and self-centered belief system might be discernible in the wider framework of the movie. It's as if there is only one man in the world, endlessly recreating himself to go through the same motions over and over, never truly connecting with any other being except as an instrument, an object for his own uses and reactions, whether base or exalted. Animals are symbols, discarded when the student outgrows the stage they represent. Women exist only for men to learn the folly of lust and possessiveness upon, and to give birth to new baby monks (and then to conveniently die, so they can't come around later with hot tea and warm socks, asking why you never write, you never call).
Even the God is distanced in the end, removed (in the form of a bronze statuette) to a high vantage point from which to be an eternal but inactive witness to the endless round of beauty, folly and pain enacted below. Unfortunately, much the same could be said of the other major religions of the world, so perhaps the critique (if there is one) is of religion itself.
But not of spirituality. At last we, the viewers, are set (by the camera) in the position of Buddha, or Christ, or Allah, or Jahweh: raised up by men to observe from on high the majestic and petty wheel of life rolling on below, as it has rolled before our eyes for the duration of the film itself. We can't interfere from so far away, and we don't want to. What could we do to make things better, more satisfying, more true? The spectacle we see and have seen is whole and glorious, deep and shallow, joyful and painful, in and of itself — a perfect (because all-inclusive) creation, commanding our humble acceptance and our love.
--SMC
June, 2004
 |
||
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||