Returns Policy
If you are unhappy with your purchase, you can return it to us within 14 days. More details
MovieMail's Review
Kim Ki-Duk is the enfant terrible of Korean cinema. His international breakout film The Isle was granted a belated release in the UK this summer after a couple of years’ wrangling with the British censors over its cruelty to live fish. Follow-up Bad Guy, released over here last year under the Asia Extreme banner, managed equally cruel things to both its characters and any audience prepared to sit through such a gruelling endurance test of a picture. His latest, though, comes as a major surprise, detailing the comings and goings on a floating Buddhist retreat and demonstrating a greatly more reflective approach to the causes and consequences of the world’s cruelty.
If we’re making the (somewhat lazy, and slightly misguided) comparison with an American enfant terrible like Tarantino – and thus comparing those most notorious films of Kim’s to the equally bloody, censor-baiting Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction – then Spring Summer… can be seen as Kim’s Jackie Brown, a film of new-found maturity and responsibility which serves, at least partly, as an apologia for what the director has subjected us to in the past.
Its real quirks are the demands Kim places once again on his animal performers. Stones are tied to fish, frogs and snakes, ropes around cockerels. A turtle is flipped on its back. And a cat’s tail is used as a makeshift paintbrush. (You can well imagine there’s a vet’s waiting room somewhere in Korea where representatives of the animal kingdom sit around bitching about what a tyrant Kim is to work for.) More important is the atmosphere the director builds around one isolated cabin on a lake as the years pass and the seasons change. (Islands and lakes are to Kim what woods and coastlines are to Francois Ozon.)
Spring Summer… tends towards the placid, and that’s as much a virtue as it is a vice, its calming properties – and its director’s hitherto unseen restraint – eventually winning you over and proving both resonant and valuable, at not just this volatile time in history but at the exact moment of its release: arriving in UK cinemas in the weeks between Van Helsing and Troy, Kim’s film took on – and maintains, even as summer shades into autumn – the look of a cinematic olive branch being offered between crashing boulders of films, and one you’d be well advised to accept.
An entrancing and meditative film charting the life of a Buddhist monk from his early days to the winter of his years. Set entirely on Jusan Pond, an artificial lake in South Korea surrounded by mountains, it's beautifully and sympathetically photographed.
Unlike Ki-duk Kim’s previous work, Spring, Summer, Autumn Winter… and Spring amazed audiences with its unique blending of strong visuals and exceptional content.
... more >
Unlike Ki-duk Kim’s previous work, Spring, Summer, Autumn Winter… and Spring amazed audiences with its unique blending of strong visuals and exceptional content.
Set on a floating monastery, located in the middle of a hidden lake, a Sensei is teaching a young monk Buddhist philosophy and practice. Their story evolves cyclically through the seasons. Following their everyday routine, while the one season follows the other, incidents occur influencing their experiences, feelings and lives.
An outstanding delivery of one of the best Zen Films ever made, creating an ecstatic exhibition for the viewer.
< less
Kim Ki-duk’s allegory of spiritual growth and the possibility for humans to shed the burdens that hinder their enlightenment has rightly garnered much praise for the b... more >
Kim Ki-duk’s allegory of spiritual growth and the possibility for humans to shed the burdens that hinder their enlightenment has rightly garnered much praise for the beauty of its filming and its uncluttered telling of a monk’s life through five seaons of his life. The setting of Jusan Pond, an artificial lake surrounded by tree-covered hills is sublime and the importance of the natural world in the monks’ world view is beautifully communicated through sympathetic photography. This is a world in which the reflections in water of the temple, trees and mountains are as important as the things themselves.
Dialogue in the film is sparse, yet no more words need speaking and events and symbols recur as if different lives are one continuous life in which all is interwoven. Likewise, the young monk’s actions reverberate down through his life. He ties stones to a fish, a frog and a snake. When his teacher catches him, he ties a stone to his pupil’s back and tells him to free the animals. If any have died he warns him, he will carry a stone in his heart for as long as he lives. The older monk himself lives in love and detachment. As he tells the adolescent monk, his composure disturbed by a young girl who has come to their small floating temple to be healed, ‘desire leads to attachment; attachment leads to suffering’. It is a hard lesson that the young man must learn by himself.
If one element in the film is unnecessary it is the synthesized musical interludes which unfortunately come across as heavy-handed in a film that gives primacy to silence and natural sounds. Also, the final summation of the monk’s life in busting song as he carries a Buddha up a mountain grates a little but adds some excitement for all that.
On a lighter note it’s worth watching to find out just what a Buddhist monk uses for a paintbrush when none are to hand!
< less
