Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (2003, Kim Ki-Duk) (Patreon)

81/100

Third viewing, last seen just prior to its U.S. theatrical release. Thought I'd reviewed it back then for Time Out New York, but apparently my colleague Josh Rothkopf snapped it up (we alternated picking first, week by week); all that's previously been on record, looks like, is my drive-by from TIFF '03:

Sublimely simple, breathtakingly lovely. From a conceptual standpoint it's perhaps a little too tidy, but one could credibly blame God or astronomy for setting the planet on infinite repeat; Kim, for his part, makes the most remarkable single-film transformation since Von Trier followed Zentropa with Breaking the Waves, abandoning his Theater of Cruelty for the contemplative rigor of a Mizoguchi. Overtly spiritual movies rarely get to me. It says a lot that this one did. 

Not quite sure where I found "contemplative rigor" in Mizoguchi's work, of which I'd still seen relatively little at that point. Think I might have just wanted to avoid Ozu as too obvious. In any case, it's still hard to believe that this ultra-Zen meditation came from the same man who devoted entire films to ghastly uses for fishhooks (The Isle) and hijinks involving a severed penis (Moebius) and virtually nonstop gang rape (the truly execrable Human, Space, Time and Human, which seems to mock one's appreciation for this film with its very title). Crucially, it never feels like a put-on—Kim was clearly fucked up in many ways, and was likely on his way to being cancelled when he died (though he'd already become irrelevant as an artist; Pietà was his last hurrah in terms of critical attention), but I detect nothing but reverent sincerity here. Certainly it has to be significant that he chose to appear onscreen for the first time, taking on All Them Seasons' most physically arduous role (even shot piecemeal); if you're feeling generous, that endless weighted trek up the mountain can register as penance for his own multitude of sins, cinematic and otherwise. Yet it's such a dramatic outlier in his oeuvre—despite the (relatively mild) animal cruelty, cut from American prints/DVDs, thereby making the ending slightly less bleak—that reconciliation becomes difficult, which can't help but breed suspicion. Ultimately, though, every frame of this straightforward, unapologetically edifying chronological journey is too gentle and patient and becalmed for me to do anything but accept it at face value. And while coherent psychology was never Kim's thing (to put it mildly), there's something ineffably moving about, for example, the two cops not merely agreeing to wait overnight, so that the apprentice can finish laboriously carving the complete Heart Sutra, but also helping to paint the characters while he sleeps afterward, exhausted by labor and guilt. Spectacular location and floating set; evocative use of cyclical repetition (I especially love the doors swinging open to a fully frozen lake in iteration #4, with the apprentice simply walking out to the monastery, finding the remains of his master's rowboat buried in the ice); and of course Kim's then-standard masterful use of minimal dialogue, conveying almost everything in precisely crafted images, as if he were making a movie or something. I took no notes, because I watched it on Christmas Day/Night and because I mistakenly believed that I'd merely be supplementing my previously published review (in fact I chose it specifically to avoid adding to my "workload" during the holidays—oops), but maybe that's just as well. It's the kind of delicate experience that you can only damage with analysis.