Zen cinema at its very best
For those with a taste for cinematic subtlety and Zen aesthetics has at least two films of good quality, says Saibal Chatterjee.
For those with a taste for cinematic subtlety and Zen aesthetics, Osian's-Cinefan has at least two films of outstanding quality: Korean director Kim Ki-duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring and Thai filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe. Both films blend heartwarming spontaneity with a deliberate creative design to deliver cinema that belongs to the topmost drawer.
The Korean film first. Kim Ki-duk is one of his country's most unique filmmakers, a worldwide reputation that he has built diligently over a decade of consistent work. He has two films in Osian's-Cinefan 2004: Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall...and Spring (2003) and Samaritan Girl (2004). Spring, written, directed and edited by Ki-duk (who also, incidentally, puts in a brief on-screen appearance in the film), presents a minimalist yet profoundly moving portrait of a small cast of characters framed against a single location -a floating temple on a remote lake.
Each intertitle of the film marks a stage of the main character's life and each stage coincides with a season. Never does this structure come across as laboured or pretentious: it is seamlessly melded with the meditative narrative and used with marvellous purity and quiet energy. The story of Spring traces the life of one young monk who ages through its five episodes.
The film opens in springtime. An old monk is engaged in passing on all his knowledge about nature and ethics to a child apprentice. In Summer, the child of the first segment, now a strapping, full-blooded teenager develops a crush for an ailing girl brought to the floating temple for treatment. Expectedly, the growing ardour between the youthful couple assumes physical proportions, but the old monk does not condemn his pupil. He tells the young monk that sex, too, is an integral part of nature. The segment closes with the young monk's departure from the floating temple.
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| Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall...and Spring |
In Fall, we see the young man seething with rage as he returns to his spiritual mentor while trying to evade the police for a crime he has committed. In Winter, using the visual resources at his disposal and tapping into the technical expertise of his cinematographer, Ki-duk emphasizes the contrast between perspectives: the calm universe of the old monk stands sharply apart from the cold world around him, where, among other things, we encounter spectacles like two policemen shooting ducks in the lake or the younger monk rehearsing martial arts moves in the frozen expanses of the water body.
The onset of another movement is signified by the older monk's disappearance from the scene once he has set the stage for his ward's final redemption. The contrite monk puts himself through a rigorous grind that will eventually lead to spiritual cleansing, and when a baby is left in his charge, the entire cycle of life undergoes yet another renewal.
In the final segment, the film about endings and fresh beginnings, returns, if only briefly, to spring - and the note that it had begun on. The mentor-student relationship plays itself out again with the director himself essaying the role of the mature monk. Kim Ki-duk's bewitching film ends with a shot of the Buddha's composed visage looking down on the floating temple from a perch high on a hill.
Nobody quite watches over the characters in Last Life in the Universe in the same manner, but this Thai film, too, stresses the inevitability of life's ebbs and tides with similar power and precision. It is made by one of the most admired Thai filmmakers, Pen-ek Ratanaruang, cinematographer Christopher Doyle brings all his technical skills to create a dreamlike visual quality within which the moody story unfolds. The film uses colours, lights and unusual camera angles to create a universe where death appears to be the only certainty even as love and redemption seem possible.
Kenji (Tadanobu Asano), a suicide-obsessed Japanese librarian living in Bangkok, attempts suicide many times, planning the act down to the last perfect detail and failing to pull it off. His life hits a different pitch when his brother is killed by a yakuza gangster and avenges the killing on the spot. On the run, he takes refuge in the messy Pattaya beach-house of Noi, a brassy bargirl who has accidentally run over sister, a mishap that Kenji has been witness to.
As the two lost souls explore the possibility of rediscovering hope and positivity, the bonding between them takes on a whole new dimension, where emotions and moral concerns rise and fall in an arc of their own. The straight narrative and the Zen-inspired mise en scene, helped no doubt by Doyle's masterly camerawork, gives The Last Life of the Universe its irresistible allure.