'Poetry' film from South Korea is poetry itself

To write poetry, the instructor says, it is important to see.

And in Poetry, Lee Chang-dong's achingly exquisite portrait of a woman's struggles with family, with forgetting, and with a terrible crime, the camera observes and records the sweet, sad rhythms of the world.

Mija (Yun Jung-hee) is retired, in her 60s, living in a small apartment in a suburban town with her grandson, Wook (Lee David), a lumpy, disaffected middle schooler who emerges from his room only for meals. (The boy's mother has moved away.) With a kind, beautiful face and a sense of ordinary grace, Mija - who favors clothes with bright, floral patterns - goes through her days. She shops and cooks, and works part-time taking care of an elderly stroke victim. She has enrolled in a poetry class, too, led by an earnest teacher who asks his group of amateur bards to think about inspiration, and where it comes from.

But Mija is also having problems with her memory. She finds herself rummaging fruitlessly for simple words. She is sent to a specialist, tested, and diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's.

Poetry opens with a chilling scene of children playing on the banks of a river, and then a body floating in the currents. It turns out to be a schoolgirl's corpse: She had been raped by a gang of boys. She killed herself in the aftermath, jumping from a bridge into the Han River.

And Wook, it seems, was one of those boys. The fathers of the others meet with Mija; they want to settle with the parents of the victim - offering hush money so their sons' lives will not be ruined. They ask the grandmother to contribute. It is money she does not have.

Poetry, then, is about guilt and responsibility, about loss, about the terrible things human beings do, and the moments of serenity and spiritual succor to be gleaned from the natural world. If this sounds wispy and sentimental and moralistic, it is not. The film has been crafted with clarity and care, and Lee's implicit criticism of South Korea's patriarchal culture - of men protecting their boys, with no real regret for the brutal theft of a girl's life - reverberates with meaning.

Yun's performance is remarkable. The journey Mija takes is painful and hard and - for us, watching - sublime.EndText