Film Reviews

Poetry

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• Details: South Korea / 139mins (TBC).

Similar in some respects to Mother – an elderly woman is at great pains to cover up a grandson's crime – Poetry's deathly slow pacing induces boredom despite the weighty themes.

Mija (Yun) is a 66-year-old grandmother who looks after her layabout teenage grandson Wook (Lee) while his mother works in another city. With a lot of spare time on her hands, Mija joins a poetry class but finds inspiration hard to come by; it doesn't help when her son, and his five friends, are accused of repeatedly raping a teenage girl who then committed suicide. The fathers of the boys band together with the hope of silencing the girl's mother with a hefty settlement but, living on government assistance, and working as a housemaid to a randy stroke victim as a nixer, Mija doesn't have a lot of cash lying around…
There is a coolness prevalent in Poetry. Not cool as in hip, but in distant, emotionally dead. In one of the opening scenes, Mija, who is suffering from the onset of Alzheimer's, walks past a distressed woman outside a hospital as she flops on the ground theatrically, heartbroken that a loved one has died; people mill around, gawking, and not one offers to help or console. Another instance is when the group of fathers get together to discuss what their sons have done and how much they will offer as settlement: not once do they talk about chastising their sons for their terrible crime or imagine what the mother must be going through. When Mija asks her son why did he do it, the only reply he can muster is a blank stare before he disappears back under his duvet. We're in River's Edge territory - a damning diatribe on the aloof and vacuous youth of today – but this is also a comment on the Korean patriarchal society. That would be enough for Chang-dong Lee to be getting on with but the generous writer-director offers more…
The problem is the more is not terribly interesting if you're not a wordsmith. The poetry scenes, of which there are many, feed into the film's theme(s) – crime and punishment, finding beauty in ugliness (Mija gets a sudden burst of inspiration when told about her grandson's crime), and responsibility (a foul-mouthed classmate is accused of being disrespectful to poetry) – but they are distracting and overlong. There's a wishing that Lee would just hurry back to the plot about the teenage boys, far and away the most interesting aspect of the film.
There is a point to Poetry but it takes so long making it chances of caring are slim by the time it does. Thanks then to Jeong-hie Yun stunning turn to help out during Poetry's downtime.

Review by Gavin Burke