Product Description
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Mija (Yun Jung-hee) is a beautiful woman in her sixties
who moves gracefully through life, contemplating a trivial daily
routine that is ill-suited to her refined persona. With elegance
and a dash of eccentricity, Mija takes care of her ungrateful
grandson Wook (Lee David) and makes a living by cleaning house
for an elderly man who, though paralyzed by a stroke, still
responds to her charm with bouts of drug-induced arousal. On a
whim, Mija enrolls in a poetry class at the local cultural centre
and begins a personal quest to find the perfect words to describe
her feelings. However, she's plagued by the onset of Alzheimer's
disease, and struggles with new vocabulary and the challenges of
the creative process. When her world is turned upside down by the
discovery of a monstrous crime, it is Mija's unique and touching
poetry that allows her to defy the weight of shame and distance
herself from a painful proximity to violence.
.com
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A sweet-natured grandmother fulfills her artistic
destiny in Lee Chang-dong's heartbreaking Poetry, winner of the
best screenplay award at Cannes. Mija (the luminous Yun
Jung-hee), looks after an elderly stroke victim to provide for
her demanding grandson, Wook (Lee David), whose divorced mother
lives in Pusan. When Wook and five middle-school friends
contribute to the suicide of a rural classmate, their hers
pressure Mija to pay into a fund to silence the press and the
victim's family. Mija’s expression is easy to read: the scheme
makes her uncomfortable. In her younger days, she tells one,
people said she had "a poet's vein," because she "likes flowers
and says odd things," so she enrolls in a poetry class, where the
instructor encourages his students to make note of the details
that surround them. This is particularly difficult for Mija as
she can't always remember the words for commonplace objects,
which her physician ascribes to Alzheimer's disease. While Mija
struggles to come up with her portion of the pay-off money, she
works on a poem, attends readings, and fends off the advances of
her lonely client. All the while, she retraces the steps of the
16-year-old farmer’s daughter who plunged to her death from a
remote bridge. It's as if Mija were turning into a sort of
metaphysical detective. She can't know exactly what the girl was
feeling, but in using her imagination, while she still has access
to it, Mija makes a surprising decision: it is the decision of a
poet. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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Review
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The body of a raped schoolgirl who has killed herself
floats downriver at the start of this exquisite Korean drama
(Poetry) by Secret Sunshine's Lee Chang-dong. Meanwhile, a
pensioner (treasured Korean star Yun Jung-hee, extraordinary)
raises her sullen grandson alone a teen implicated in the girl's
death. Facing a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, the older woman enrolls
in a poetry class, desperate to find the words to describe beauty
before language fails her. She does even better: She herself
becomes a kind of poem about what it means to really see the
world. A --Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
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