Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…. And Spring

There are explicit and implicit lessons to be learned from Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, so listen up. The first one is if you want people to see your movie it behooves you to come up with a more succinct title. The second one – and more pertinent to the film – is don’t tie rocks to little animals – especially if they are still alive. However, it’s okay to tie rocks to yourself as a way of self-punishment – especially if you’re doing it for spiritual reasons.

Directed by one of Korea’s hot young directors – Kim Ki-duk – Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring is a Buddhism-inspired fable that takes place during five seasons spread over many years and attempts – much like The Passion of The Christ – to merge the secular with the spiritual. But unlike that film, this one also gives us the relationship between man and nature as well as man and himself, and deals specifically with characters who try to attain some kind of harmony right here on earth.

Korean director Kim Ki-duk's Buddhism-inspired fable takes place on a placid lake nestled among hills on which floats a small, one-room monastery housing two monks, one old and one young. The action takes place over the course of several years, and is divided into five sections denoted by the seasons of the title. While each section tells a story of its own, the overall plot follows the education of the younger monk, a small boy in the beginning, as he learns lessons over the course of his life from his aging counterpart. Troubled outsiders also visit the monastery seeking guidance, including an ill young woman and a man who murdered his wife. As the title suggests, the film's ultimate theme is cyclical renewal. Just as the seasons pass through phases of birth and death and rebirth, so do the lives of Kim's characters.

In the midst of the Korean wilderness, a Buddhist master patiently raises a young boy to grow up in wisdom and compassion, through experience and endless exercises. Once the pupil discovers his sexual lust, he seems lost to contemplative life and follows his first love, but soon fails to adapt to the modern world, gets in jail for a crime of passion and returns to the master in search of spiritual redemption and reconciliation with karma, at a high price of physical catharsis…

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