#ji bark

Foreign Film Weekends - South Korea: Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom/Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...And Spring (2003), or the Circle of Life but not the happy Lion King kind. 

Director Kim Ki-duk is known for his “arthouse” films, but also courts controversy over depictions of animal cruelty, violence, and perhaps misogyny in his films (think Oldboy, another South Korean affair, but like....way less). With Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...And Spring, Kim may not have shied away from questionable animal cruelty, but drew a very different kind of attention in relation to the tone of his film. 

Spring is a Buddhist fable. I felt like I was experiencing something very important in watching something so simple and so meaningfully derived. Much like the religion it abides by, Spring embraces the sometimes painful existence one experiences within the wheel of life (a Tibetan Buddhist concept), which is bound - or doomed? - to repeat itself, just as the seasons roll around each year. 

The film is broken down into five parts, the titular order of seasons, that follow the lives of an elderly monk (Oh Young-soo) and his apprentice monk who live on a floating one room house on the isolated Jusan Pond, which serves as both hideaway from the world and temple for prayer and meditation. As a child, the Child Monk (Kim Jong-ho) learns the suffering of cruelty and of guilt upon the soul when he sees the consequences of his juvenile torment upon animals. As an adolescent, Boy Monk (Seo Jae-kyeong) experiences the fires of love and lust when The Girl (Ha Yeo-jin) stays at the hermitage to become well. The Young Adult Monk (Kim Young-min) receives penitence from his master to clear his tormented soul of anger and fear. Finally, the monk, now a grown man, survives the old monk and pursues peace of heart and presence of mind through Buddhist practices and atonement, and eventually becomes the master himself to a new child novice (Song Min-young). 

The plot unfolds naturally and leaves the commentary upon the season’s of a man’s life to be colored by the presence of Buddhist iconography and symbolism, rather than guide or force any meaning to be gleaned. There is no exposition to be found here. One might even lose some appreciation for the depth of the symbolism without a knowledge of Korean and Buddhist metaphor. I took notes and looked things up after finishing my screening, and felt sad that I did not make connections during my viewing that could have influenced my understanding better. 

The raft house is almost an ark with the number of animals featured in this film - a dog, a rooster, a cat, many snakes, some fish, frogs, and a turtle. And a partridge in a pear tree. All of them have meanings that, as a non-eastern or non-Buddhist viewer, I simply did not get. For instance, there are many and sundry a snake in all of the chapters of this film, which I so western-ly associated with sin and corruption a la Adam and Eve. However, serpents in Buddhism symbology are guardians and mythic protectors, who watched over the monk in Spring especially when he needed it in the “winter” of his life when he was alone (I think I saw half a dozen of the buggers). The Elder Monk has a white cat, whose tail he uses to ink the rites of atonement for the Younger Monk to carve out. Korean culture traditionally portrays felines as creatures that drive away bad spirits and unseen tormenters, which the young monk most certainly required at the time. Roosters equal new beginnings and hope for the budding relationship of the monk’s youth, Turtles equal longevity and predictions of the future, as the new apprentice child seems destined to repeat the monk’s mistakes. And there I was, just thinking, “oooh! a kitty!” Clearly a lot stands to be lost from this complex film without proper context, which not all may have. 

No matter what the background of an audience, there are a few unalienable qualities to Spring. Firstly, Baek Dong-hyeon’s cinematography under Kim Ki-duk’s direction is masterful. It is simple and gorgeous. Long and distant wide shots of the lake, the landscape, and the little raft house show its isolation, cloistered in the mountains under the watchful gaze of ever-changing nature surrounding it. The final shot of the film sees a Buddhist holy statue placed atop a mountain by Adult Monk looking down upon the lake without judgement and at once, I felt peace and satisfaction, which I often don’t with open ended movies that perhaps lack closure to my tastes. This open end doesn’t leave loose strings, though, but depicts life as continuous and cyclical, and I understood. 

Composer Ji Bark really helped me find that zen with his beautiful, peaceful, and occasionally very eastern sounding scoring. A song written specifically for the film is sung in the fifth act, and it is aching and timeless, modern and traditional at once. It is transcendent of the strictures of time just like the film which it accompanies. 

Yet Spring is not unaffected by time, just not dependent upon it. It shows the circle that life may and often will follow, but it gives the simple hope of learning from the grand design of nature. Kim is quoted in an interview saying, ''If we were able to remember life's lesson from spring we wouldn't repeat them, but like winter which rots away the leaves and freezes over everything, like the seasons' patterns, our patterns in life will make us forget and repeat our past mistakes. This is not only a Buddhist idea but one of the facts of life.” 

The seasons of our lives and of human existence continue to follow each other in turn. Spring is a meditation upon one man’s individual life, but also upon the human experience and the hope life provides.