I'm assuming the character is Korean for poetry. It accents the poster perfectly. Beautiful, simple, elegant -- yet deceptive. A close look reveals the technique required to create the figure. Exact angles, clean attack, precise dimension and relation of the strokes to one another, the nature or feel of the elements -- some wispy and yielding, some hard, solid, or perhaps stern. None of it an accident.
The summary:
A sixty-something woman, faced with the discovery of a heinous family crime, finds strength and purpose when she enrolls in a poetry class.
This cruelty doesn’t exist in isolation, as becomes obvious when the father of one of the other accused rapists contacts Mija and sweeps her off to an afternoon meeting at a restaurant. Together, he and four other fathers have decided — with the school’s blessing — to give the dead girl’s mother a large sum of cash, a bribe for her silence. What’s done is done, one man more or less says, as another pours the beer. (“Ladies first,” he says, offering Mija a glass.) “Although I feel sorry for the dead girl,” a father says, “now’s the time for us to worry about our own boys.” Her face empty, Mija sits wordlessly. And then she drifts outside, opens her little notebook and begins writing: “Blood ... a flower as red as blood.”
The more you know about 'Poetry' the harder it is to resist. If such stories appeal to you, reading Dargis' review pretty much means you have to watch the movie. That's the way I felt when I saw the poster.
'Poetry' took the Best Screenplay award at Cannes. Written and directed by Lee Chang-dong.
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