SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER...AND SPRING
Directed, Written & Edited by: Kim Ki Duk.
Produced by: Lee Seung Jae.
Director of Photography: Baek Dong Hyun.
Music by: Bark Ji Woong.
Released by: Sony Pictures Classics.
Country of Origin: South Korea. 103 min. Rated: R.
With: Oh Young Soo, Kim Young Min, Ha Yeo Jin & Kim Ki Duk.

Visually arresting, Baek Dong Hyun’s cinematography will stay with you even as the film’s facile moral lessons fade away. In a Buddhist monastery floating atop a lake - surrounded by verdant, mist-enshrouded mountains - lives an Old Monk and his sole charge, a child monk. The Old Monk quietly observes from the sidelines the boy as he first weighs a fish down by a stone, next a frog, and then a snake during an excursion on land. The boy laughs as the creatures flounder, unable to move. But then the boy awakes to find himself strapped to a heavy stone. The Old Monk commands him to find and free the creatures. If they are found dead, the elder admonishes, “you’ll carry the stone in your heart for the rest of your life.”

In the film’s second chapter, set in summer, the boy is now a young adult monk. The arrival of an attractive girl to the idyll ends the monks’ isolation. Dressed in contemporary clothes, she is the first indication of the time setting. Left in the care of the Old Monk, she is diagnosed as having, “no peace in her soul.” At the same time, the lesson learned by the boy in the first chapter, restraint, is tested when his lust is aroused. What follows are amusing sequences of an awkward courtship between the young people. Sleeping in the same room, only a few feet from each other, both lie awake, stealing glances of the other. In the third act, set in autumn, the film takes a turn toward the melodrama, which has been heavily foreshadowed. The young man, now an adult, frantically reenters the Monk’s domain, with the intrusion of the outside world bound to follow (he hasn’t quite absorbed the Monk’s teachings.) Inevitably, like nature - and the cycle of life - the story comes full circle.

Despite its religious setting, the film is at times sexy, humorous, and even suspenseful. The memorable images overwhelmingly dominate the film - a languid boat ride on the lake, a deadly walk on ice, and calligraphy with the use of a cat’s tail. In this way it’s virtually a silent film. Hardly profound, if not simplistic, its fable-like quality is reminiscent of F. W. Murnau’s silent film Sunrise (1927), also concerning a rite of passage. Kent Turner
April 1, 2004