The jacket of this film says that it is about ‘an aging part-time maid’ raising an ‘apathetic’ teenage grandson and taking a poetry class because she is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
It identifies Yun Jung-hee, an elderly woman in a white sunhat pictured on the front who plays the grandmother, as Korea’s ‘greatest actress.’ It notes that the film’s writer and director Lee Chang-dong’s screenplay won at Cannes in 2011.
All of this is true. Yet none of it prepares one for the remarkable work of art that this movie turns out to be.
In place of music, the film has a sense of all-pervading quietness, occasionally broken by sounds of nature or manmade noise. This would describe the quietness of a solitary life. What is remarkable about it is that Lee’s narrative fully engages the viewer, maintaining an unhurried but steady pace without resorting to clichéd techniques such as ‘pensive’ empty spaces and plainly mute—and deadly boring—‘atmospheric’ pictures.
There are actually several narrative threads that weave into a whole by the end of the picture. Nothing is random, and nothing is wasted.
Four small boys playing on a river bank discover the body of ‘Agnes’ Park Hee-jin (Han Su-yeong) floating down the river. Hee-jin was a schoolgirl who took her own life by jumping from a high bridge.
Yang Mi-ja (Yun Jung-hee) is an aging woman whose doctor is concerned that her slowly developing inability to find common words indicates the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Leaving the clinic, Mi-ja is disturbed when she sees Hee-jin’s distraught mother (Park Myeong-sin), barefoot and keening, outside the emergency room where the girl’s body was brought.
Mi-ja relates this scene to the shopkeeper daughter-in-law of Elder Kang (Kim Hee-ra), a severe stroke victim whom she bathes and for whom she does his laundry and housework to supplement her social security pension.
Everyone is polite to Mi-ja, but no one seems to pay much attention to this reticent older woman who dresses inexpensively but with an elegance that nearly everyone remarks. Everyone, that is, except for her grandson Jong Wook (David Lee) a typical, thoughtless teenage boy whom Mi-ja is raising for her divorced daughter who lives elsewhere in Korea.
Mi-ja enrolls in a poetry class at a local community center. She thinks using words might help her combat forgetting them, and she always wanted to learn to write poetry. The class consists of about a dozen middle-aged women and a man, taught by Kim Yong-taek, a Korean poet who plays himself in the film.
Mi-ja is the oldest student. She gets Yong-taek’s attention right away—as well as that of the other students—because she readily admits her ignorance by asking earnest, basic questions that anyone introduced to art would ask, but that most would find too embarrassing. Moreover, Mi-ja persists until satisfied that her interlocutor has answered her question to the extent of his ability.
This challenges the person being asked the question, rather than highlight the questioner’s presumed ignorance. It is an important key to Mi-ja’s character and the narrative, because she does so in a spirit of genuine inquiry. But it takes a thoughtful and self-confident person challenged in this way to respond fairly and adequately—as true in life as it is of art. This is what makes this movie really stand out.
The ‘life’ part is that Jong Wook and a group of his school friends are connected with Hee-jin’s suicide. The boys’ fathers, identified only as such, get in touch with the virtually destitute Mi-ja to try to find a way to buy the silence of Agnes Hee-jin’s mother (like the fathers, identified only as the ‘parent of’ one of the children).
The remarkable character that the actress Yun Jung-hee creates and this character’s idiosyncratic search to understand what it takes to make a work of art braid the disparate narrative strands into an unforgettable story.
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