Cool Movie Alert! Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring.

I've had a major deadline looming at work the last few weeks. One which I've successfully ignored (aside from a few guilty feelings in the weekend). Today... it got brought forward a day... and so I started the work involved. Since I find that 90% of the burden of any job is actually starting it... I fully expect to finish it by lunchtime.

Remember that old Lily Langtree series? When Oscar Wilde says something along the lines of "I've had SUCH a busy day, this morning I inserted a comma, and this afternoon I took it out." I know the feeling.

And so it is I feel justified in goofing off for 10 minutes to tell you about this movie.... which I missed from last year's film festival.

I just don't have the words to describe how gorgeous this is. Set on a small Buddhist temple floating in a lake, somewhere in Korea, it concerns the lives of an old monk, and his young charge who we see grow into adulthood (the Spring, Summer, Autumn & Winter of his life, geddit?).

When this film takes place is indeterminate for a long time into the running, could be yesterday, it could be 3000 years ago. It's not until visitors arrive at the temple that the period can be guessed at by their clothing.

At the start of the movie, it is Spring, and the old monk is teaching his apprentice a hard lesson in life, that will have its final repercussions decades later. Skip forward 10 years or so to Summer, when the apprentice is a young man & he and the old monk are caring for a sick young woman. When she is cured, lust rears its head & this episode ends with the young man leaving the temple to follow his heart (and the young woman). The old monk warns that "Lust leads to possession, and possession leads to murder." Which later on gets you wondering about what happened in HIS earlyier life.

Come Autumn (or Fall, as the subtitles insist), the young man is now 30, and back at the temple on the run from the law. His master's words were prophetic. In this episode he must work the anger from his soul & confront his destiny.

Some years later, and it is Winter. This time the young man, now middle aged, is able to walk across the frozen lake. He finds his master has died in the intervening period, and he has come home to take his place. Before Winter is out (following an unexpectedly tragic incident, which will make you gasp!), the monk takes charge of a young apprentice... and it is Spring again. Life is circular. Etc.

Believe me, telling you the plot won't detract from your viewing experience in the slightest. This is just beautiful.

There are some fascinating details too. There are doors that the monks & visitors diligently use, but no walls. There must be some symbolism that I'm unaware of. And by golly, I don't know if snakes share the same representations in Buddhism as Christianity... but there sure are a lot of them in this movie.

Oh yeah - addendum... Mrs Llew states she is getting heartily tired of "Asian" movies (a staple at the SunnyO household). But what she really means is that she's so over the tippity-tappety flying through the air martial arts thing. Which is a pity, I've got House of Flying Daggers lined up...

But Spring, Summer etc, has none of that... except for one brief, ambiguously mystical occurence that answered the question we'd had most of the way through... "How does the old man get across the lake to keep tabs on the boy, when the boy has the boat?" I'll keep you in suspense. But suffice to say, we all looked at each knowingly... because we've seen these guys tippity-tappety & fly in other movies... although, that's not what he does...

Anyway, you could do a lot worse than spending some time with a couple of Buddhist monks in the middle of a lake.

I promise I'll watch something with a car chase soon...