FILM-FORWARD.COMReviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER...AND SPRING
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
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