Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . .and Spring was something of a shocking surprise, coming as it did from the bad-boy of Korean cinema. Somehow director Kim Ki-duk suddenly made the unexpected transition from gruesome, stomach-churning fare to treacly spirituality for this change-of-pace film.

Historical Background: Kim Ki-duk was born in a mountain village of South Korea in 1960 and moved with his family to Seoul when he was nine. His early years 3were anything but promising. He dropped out of school as a teenager and took a job in a factory, before joining the marines, which is the toughest branch of the South Korean armed services. He was twenty when he began that stint and twenty-five when he was discharged. Kim had been a painter since childhood and, in 1990, he went to Paris to study fine arts, supporting himself there by selling his paintings on the street. Kim's difficult early years have colored his style and choice of subjects as a filmmaker.

Back in Korea in 1993, Kim won an award for best screenplay from the Education Institute of Screenwriting for a script entitled A Painter and a Criminal Condemned to Death. After two more such awards for screenwriting, he directed his first film, called Crocodile (1996). Alienated young people were the subject matter of that film and his next, Wild Animals (1997). Kim soon established a reputation as an outsider with a taste for violent, agonizing topics, and he relished setting himself apart in that way. Birdcage Inn (1998) and The Isle (2000) both took up the topic of prostitution. The latter film, in particular, features some powerfully disturbing images. Real Fiction (2000) told the story of a serial killer tracking down all who had ever wronged him and Address Unknown (2001) dealt with the residues of the Korean War. Kim solidified his "bad boy" image with Bad Guy (2001), another film with emotionally charged images, about a mute tough guy who kidnaps a college student and forces her into prostitution.

Around about the time when everyone thought they knew Kim's niche, he shifted gears dramatically for the present film, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . .and Spring. In Kim's own words, he wanted to explore another side of himself. "I feel like I've been living life in a rush, so I wanted to slow down a little and make a movie like this." The surprising result was a lovely, serene and contemplative film set in a Buddhist temple afloat on a beautiful remote lake. The film won the Don Quixote Prize at the Locarno Film Festival. After this film, Kim made Samaritan Girl (2004) and 3-Iron (2004). Considering the rate of maturation of Kim's filmmaking skills, we may very well have not yet seen his best work.

The Story: The story is divided into five segments, each set in a particular season, according to the sequence of the film's title. The five seasons are not successive however, since a gap of about ten years separates each film segment. In the first part, an unnamed Buddhist monk (Oh Young-Soo) lives with his young apprentice (Kim Jong-ho), also unnamed, a boy of about eight. Their home is a floating monastery on a remote lake nestled in a valley among towering mountains. At the side of the lake, there is a pier with an ornamental and creaky wooden gate. From there, would-be guests can request access to the monastery via a rowboat. It is spring as the film opens and the spring of the young boy's life as well. The boy is slowly learning the ways of life, from his Buddhist master. When the man notices the young boy gleefully tormenting various critters (a fish, a frog, and a snake) in the pool at the base of a lovely small waterfall, the monk determines to give his young protégé an object lesson. Since the boy had tied stones to the critters to burden their existences, the monk ties a stone to the boy's back while he is asleep. When he awakens, the boy is told that he must wear the stone until he determines if the creatures are still alive and that he will carry the stone in his heart for the rest of his life, if any have died. When the boy discovers that the fish has indeed died, he bawls inconsolably.

As the season changes to summer, the story jumps forward ten years. A woman (Jung-young Kim) brings her teenaged daughter (Ha Yeo-jin) to the monastery, because the girl is perpetually despondent. She hopes that the monk will find a cure for the girl. The monk's protégé is also a teen and his fascination with the attractive girl triggers a sexual awakening. She is initially standoffish but is soon taken by the lad's antics and devotion. Ultimately, the pair fall in love or, at least, discover an irrepressible carnal lust for one another. They begin having sex whenever they can find the opportunities. When the monk discovers the young lovers asleep together in the boat, limbs intertwined, he pulls the plug on the relationship – literally. He removes the plug from the bottom of the boat and allows it to fill with water. Still, he treats the development as a natural part of life. Since the girl has regained her good spirits, the monk acknowledges that the boy apparently found her cure, but also determines that it is time for her to return home. The apprentice, having discovered the joys of passion, decides to leave with her. The monk warns that lust leads to possessiveness and possessiveness to murderous impulses, but the boy has made up his mind to leave.

In autumn, the monk's warning proves prophetic, ten years later. He reads in a newspaper that a thirty year-old husband has fled after murdering his wife. Soon, the former apprentice shows up, obviously on the lam. He is deeply tormented by his crime of passion (he had found her with another man) and seeks the monk's help with penitence. He makes some progress through floggings and being hog-tied and suspended. The monk then assigns him the task of carving out the letters of the Pranja-parpamitasutra that the monk has outlined on the monastery's deck. Two policemen arrive (Dae-han Ji and Min Choi), in modern dress, searching for the murder suspect. The former apprentice at first thinks to resist arrest with the knife he's using for carving letters (which is also the murder weapon), but the old monk instructs him to complete his penitence. The monk gets the two policemen to agree to wait until morning so that the man can finish his penitence task. When the man finally falls asleep, exhausted, the priest paints the letters, using the tail of a (semi-cooperative) cat as a brush. The two policemen then take the murder suspect into custody, as the monk waves farewell. After his old ward has left, the monk builds a pyre in the rowboat, covers his eyes and mouth with patches decorated with Buddhist script, and engages in ritual self-immolation.

In winter, the old apprentice returns to the vacant hermitage. The lake is frozen over. He has paid his debt to society and will live out his life in the tranquility of his old retreat. He studies the prayer and meditative techniques recorded by his old master, as well as some martial arts techniques. A veiled woman (Ji-a Park) arrives with a child (Min-Young Song). She weeps, but ultimately abandons her child, running away furtively, until she falls through a hole in the ice and drowns. In the morning, the monk discovers the accident, pulls her lifeless body from the lake, and marks the spot with a Buddhist figurine. The monk completes his penitence by dragging a stone tied to his waste to the top of a nearby mountain, carrying a Buddhist statue, which he places at the peak to overlook the lake and monastery below.

Themes: Most of the reviews that I came across for this film are unreservedly glowing. Although I loved the look of this film and its meditative quality, there is something troubling to me about the thematic content. Most reviewers seem to have been lulled by the beauty of the images into imagining that this film is an uplifting perspective on life or that it illustrates the spiritual wisdom of the Buddhist viewpoint. One viewer, for example, states, "The wise healer teaches a young boy the ways of the Buddha." Another says, "The foibles of child cruelty is met with a simple retribution which imparts a lasting lesson." Well, how lasting was that lesson about cruelty, considering that the boy later became a murderer? Apparently, the lesson was not all that effective. Now, personally, I've known quite a few good parents who have managed to raise kids and teach them about restraining cruel impulses well enough that those children did not become murderers. Resorting to retribution is probably not the most effective method for suppressing cruel tendencies. In both the first spring segment and the fall segment, we see violence being taught, in effect, under the guises of retribution and then penitence. This kind of approach to teaching about violence mainly only teaches that one needs to avoid getting caught (which is the apprentice's motivation for returning after his crime).

There is additional evidence of the shortcomings in the monk's approach to raising a child in the summer segment, as the young man's sexuality awakens. There's an apparent contradiction in what this film implies about the teachings of Buddhism. On the one hand, Buddhism teaches that desire leads to suffering and that, therefore, craving nothing is the path to enlightenment. Buddhism promotes non-affectivity, which means suppression of selfish desires, such as lust, possessiveness, and greed. Buddhism also focuses on the importance of the natural order of things. Therein lies a contradiction. Desire is part of the natural order. People, like every other sentient critter, have desires precisely because desires follow directly from the survival instinct. Lust, for example, provides for procreation, while possessiveness promotes security, to an extent. The young apprentice was totally unprepared to manage his desires effectively because he was taught instead to suppress them. In that respect, the teachings of Buddhism can be likened to that approach to sex and drug education in America embodied by the "just say no" admonition. Or it could be likened to the abstinence requirement for Catholic priests (which all too often leads to sexual deviancies). Denial of desires is not consistent with the nature of biological systems. Children need to be taught proper channeling of desires, as part of socialization, rather than denial.

Neither of the main characters in this film is what I would consider a good model for healthy psychological adjustment. One lives an austere life in isolation and terminates that life via self-immolation. The other commits murder on his path toward self-realization. It's all well and good that he ultimately reaches a state of atonement, redemption, and inner peace, but his victim never got that chance. There's something misogynistic about Kim's views here (which has been noted in relation to his other work, as well). The women are dispensable. One is murdered, another drowns, but it seems to matter little so long as the man completes his journey to self-awareness. There's also the sexist inference that the cure for a girl's despondency is to have a man's you-know-what inside her as quickly and as often as possible

This is not the "way of the Buddha" as I understand it. Murder is too high a price for the discovery of spiritual awareness. Women do not exist merely to provide obstacles to the self-awareness of men. A little more affection on the part of the monk for his protégé and a few more heart-to-heart talks would go a lot further than acts of retribution toward teaching the child abhorrence for violence and the need to channel lust, without the price of the learning being so high. Kim is a devout Catholic, not a Buddhist, and one wonders whether the idea of penitence through flagellation isn't more a reflection of his Catholicism than Buddhist practices

One reviewer gushes that "the spiritual themes of this film . . . demonstrate the power of those willing to believe" and that the film is "poignant in today's terror filled world" and provides "hope for our fellow man." Really? Self-immolation, murder, denial of sexuality, flagellation as education . . . . these give hope to mankind? Although this film is a good deal more mature than Kim's previous work, it is nevertheless still about the brutality of human nature.

The most worthwhile thematic element of the film, in my opinion, relates to its reverential view of its natural setting. After the three lead characters, the most important "performers" are the animals, rather than other people. Kim uses animals so effectively as symbols that the film acquires an almost Aesopian flavor to it. The monk has a different pet for each season (a dog, a rooster, a cat, a snake, and a turtle). It is interesting to note that particular animals don't always have the same symbolic meanings in Eastern cultures that they have in Western ones. In most Western films, snakes represent "evil" and "duplicity" but, in this film, the snakes represent innocence. It is the young monk who is the grinning tormentor. The emphasis on the seasonal structure of the film serves as a reminder of the cyclical nature of life, which is a central tenet of Eastern religions. We are also effectively reminded that nature is man's true habitat, not the modern cityscapes.

Production Values: There's very little dialog or action in this film, yet it's not especially slow-paced or boring. The beauty of the visual images helps maintain viewer interest throughout. The story has a lyrical simplicity, reminiscent of a parable. Each section of the film begins with a symbolic opening of the lakeside gate, as though it were some kind of curtain for a puppet theater. The idea of changing seasons as a metaphor for the stages of life is not original, by any means, but Kim uses it effectively.

The highlight of the film is the gorgeous images provided by cinematographer Baek Dong Hyun, which are partly attributable to the film's location at the artificial Jusan Pond in Korea's remote North Kyungsang Province (Kim had to negotiate for six months to obtain permission to shoot there) but also the result of exceptional shot composition. The overall beauty of the film is competitive with any film ever made. Some of the standout visual treats include the carvings on the wooden gate, the pool at the base of a waterfall, a frozen waterfall thawing in spring, the goldfish swimming in the glistening water, the young monk in winter practicing martial arts, and a panorama of the lake and the monastery from atop a lakeside mountain. I found the soundtrack appealing.

Kim himself played the young monk during the winter segment and the role for that segment was physically demanding (a martial arts workout and a climb up a steep, nearby mountain with a stone tied to his waist). The apprentice character is played first (as a child) by Jong-ho Kim, then as a boy by Jae-kyeong Seo, as an adolescent, by Young-min Kim, and finally by the director.

Bottom-Line: This film is a hard-R because the sexual scenes are overt, though not graphic. Most of what is exposed is the man's backside. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . .and Spring is a lusciously beautiful film and easy to enjoy. Most viewers don't seem to share my reservations about the thematic content. You might not either. The surface feel to the film is one of poetic spirituality and the typical viewer may not be concerned about the underlying irrationality of the lessons being taught. I strongly recommend this film, despite my reservations about its psychological validity. I'm giving it four stars as a compromise between a five-star look and feel and three-star thematic credibility. This film is in Korean with English subtitles and has a running time of 103 minutes.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Korea:

Chunhyang
Shiri

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age