More from the movie corner of Graziella: Poetry
Like last week’s The Wind Will Carry Us, albeit differently, this week’s film is a tribute to poetry. Quietly heartrending and uplifting at once, Lee Chang-dong’s 2010 masterpiece Poetry is about the importance of seeing, seeing the world deeply with the eyes of the heart. An artisan-director who made only six films in twenty years, the Korean Lee succeeded in enlisting, for this film, the great veteran actress Yun Jung-hee who had retired in the mid-nineties. Yun’s performance as Mija, an aging woman raising her only grandson in an unnamed city’s cluttered apartment, is simply magical. Mija’s pursuit of poetry starts as a way to exercise a mind that, a doctor tells her, has begun to slip slowly away from her; poetry then becomes a pastime, and then a passion, and finally a means of transcendence. Out of pain Mija finds a way to really see the world, with its flowers, its rivers and tears. Hers is an extraordinary transformation, one that might inspire you as well, and so, give Poetry a try.
Watch Poetry on Kanopy here.
