Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
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| Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring | |
 Movie poster of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring |
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|---|---|
| Directed by | Kim Ki-duk |
| Produced by | Karl Baumgartner Lee Seung-jae |
| Written by | Kim Ki-duk |
| Starring | Su Oh-yeong Kim Young-min Seo Jae-kyung Kim Jong-ho |
| Distributed by | Cineclick Asia |
| Release date(s) | September 19, 2003 (South Korea) |
| Running time | 103 min. |
| Language | Korean |
| IMDb profile | |
| Korean name | |
| Hangul: | 봄여름가을겨울그리고봄 |
| Hanja: | (n/a) |
| Revised Romanization: | Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom |
| McCune-Reischauer: | (n/a) |
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is a 2003 Korean movie about a Buddhist monastery which floats on a lake in a pristine forest. The story is about the life of a Buddhist monk as he passes through the seasons of his life, from childhood to old age.
The movie was directed by Kim Ki-duk, and stars Su Oh-yeong, Kim Young-min, Seo Jae-kyung, Kim Jong-ho. The director himself appears as the man in the last stage of life. The quiet, contemplative film marked a significant change from his previous works which were often criticized for excessive violence and misogyny.
Contents |
[edit] Story
[edit] Spring
There is an old wise monk who is the master, and a young boy who is the master's novice and protégé.
One day the boy is climbing a rocky slope, and is gathering some plants from the ledge of a boulder as a snake appears behind the rock. The snake moves towards the boy, but the boy nonchalantly grabs the snake with his hand and throws it away from himself. Then the boy climbs further up the slope to the head of a big statue of the Buddha, and perches next to the Buddha's ear as he watches the natural scenery in front of him.
One day in spring the boy is playing outside with animals. He sees a fish in the stream, captures it, and ties a rock to it by means of a string: he winds the string several times around the fish and puts the fish back in the water. The fish has difficulty swimming, but the boy finds it amusing. Then the boy finds a frog, and he ties a rock around the frog's torso, then lets the frog back in the water. The frog tries to swim by pushing itself in the water, but is tied down by the rock. Finally, the boy finds a snake among the rocks. He ties a rock to the snake: the snake tries to crawl, and the boy laughs.
Unbeknownst to the boy, the old monk was watching him. At night in the monastery, the boy sleeps in his corner and the old monk ties a large stone to the boy's back with a rope.
The next morning the boy wakes up and notices the weight attached to him. He complains to his master. His master asks him if he tied a stone to a fish. The boy says yes. The master asks the boy if he tied a stone to a frog. The boys says yes. The master asks if the boy tied a stone to a snake. The boy says yes. The old monk asks the boy how he thinks the animals felt when they could not move properly. The boy answers that what he did was wrong.
Then the master orders the boy to go with the stone tied to his back, find the animals and untie them. If he does so, then the old man will untie the big stone on the young boy's back. But if he should find the animals dead, then he would carry the stone in his heart for the rest of his life.
The boy goes out with the stone still tied to his back and struggles to get back to the stream. In the stream, he finds the fish dead, on the bottom of the shallow stream, tied to the rock. The boy goes to the part of the stream under a boulder and finds the frog floating, still tied to the rock. He unwinds the string from the frog, and sets the frog free. The frog swims away in the stream. Then the boy struggles his way out of the stream, making noise while stumbling with his bare feet on the rocks, and finds the snake, but the snake is bloodied and dead. The boy cries with profound grief.
[edit] Summer
The boy has grown older and is now an adolescent. There is a gate with two doors which leads to the monastery. The pair of doors open up to a view of the floating monastery on the misty lake. The young monk sees a pair of visitors walking along a path to the lake. The young monk meets them on the path and leads them to his boat, and then he rows them towards the monastery. The mother tells the young monk that her daughter is sick. The young monk points to a tree by the water and says that tree is over three hundred years old, and that her daughter will soon be as healthy as the tree.
They meet the master. They go inside the wooden temple where there is an altar with a statue of the Buddha in meditative position. In front of the Buddha is a fish pond with goldfish swimming in it. The mother kneels in front of the Buddha and joins her hands in prayer and supplication. The old monk performs some chants and beats a hollow wooden instrument with a wooden stick. Later, the old monk tells the mother that something is bothering her daughter's spirit, but that when it is dealt with properly, her physical ailments will go away.
At night, both monks sleep in a small room on the side of the temple. The girl in her white dress kneels in front of the Buddha and prays, later on she is sprawling on the floor in front of the altar, almost asleep. At one time, she gets close to the pond and watches the fish.
One morning the girl lies sleeping on the floor, uncovered, in her white dress. The young monk brings a blanket to spread on top of her. He does so. But then, looking at her, he becomes tempted, grabs the edge of the blanket, lifts it and grabs her breast. She wakes up and slaps his face. He feels guilty and turns towards the Buddha and starts praying nervously. The old monk comes in and notices the prayers, and asks the young monk why he is praying at such an unusual time of the day.
Later, the young monk takes the girl to the shore in the boat. It is a sunny day as she walks along the rocks up to a stream to look at the fish. He follows her and watches her closely from atop a rock. As he tries to get closer to her, he falls into the water and startles the girl. He immediately dives and catches a fish with his bare hands, keeping it in his closed fist. He stretches his closed fist out to her and drops the fish in her hand. The fish moves nervously and then jumps out of her hand. The young monk then attempts to caress her face, in response to which she slaps him and walks away.
The young monk's frustration grows. One day he is frantically rowing in circles in the lake while the girl watches him from the floating temple. Suddenly he stops and looks at her before diving into the water. She becomes concerned and walks to the edge of the platform after he doesn't immediately surface. He bursts from the edge of the water and pulls her in, screaming. They get into the boat and row to the shore. They next make love by the side of the stream.
At night the young monk wakes up while the old one sleeps next to him. The girl looks at the young monk and smiles at him; she lifts up her bed cover and beckons him towards her. He goes. Later, they are on the outer platform of the monastery-boat. The old monk is watching them as he works. The young monk finds a grasshopper and puts it on the girl's shoulder. She screams in fright and the young monk chases her around the platform.
One night they leave the temple after the monk is asleep, row the boat to beneath a tree and make love in the boat. Afterwards they fall asleep in the boat. The next morning the old man finds them asleep in the drifting boat. The old monk throws a cock with a leash towards the boat. The cock perches on the prow of the row-boat as the old man draws the boat towards him by pulling slowly at the leash. When the boat is next to him, he unplugs a hole on the floor of the boat and the boat begins to flood. The two wake up shocked by the cold water.
Later they are back in the temple and the old monk asks the girl if she is still feeling sick. She says she is not. The old monk replies that she has therefore received the proper medicine and that she should go. The young monk does not want her to go. The old monk prophetically tells him that love leads to lust, and that lust leads to murder.
The old monk rows the girl to shore and she leaves the monastery. The young monk cannot stand his lust at night, so he grabs the statue of the Buddha and puts it in his backpack, and then he rows the boat towards the gate and leaves the monastery.
[edit] Fall
The gates towards the floating monastery reopen, and behind it the trees have red leaves which are about to fall. The old monk no longer has the statue of the Buddha with him, so he prays or meditates with an image of the Buddha painted on the wall, an image whose facial features have mostly faded.
The white cat is still with him. The monk puts the cat tightly in his backpack, with the cat's head sticking out. He gets in the boat and navigates slowly around the lake.
When he returns to the floating plank on which stands the temple, he sits outside and opens the bag, lets the cat out, and withdraws a block of rice cake wrapped up in a newspaper. He lays the newspaper on the floor, using it as a floor mat for his lunch. As he is eating some of the rice cake, he notices a headline on the newspaper: a 30 year old man flees after killing his wife.
Then he sees or hears someone opening the gate. He gets on the boat and rows on the lake towards the gate. The man at the gate was his novice who has now grown older. When they return to the monastery, the old monk sees that something happened to the younger man: he asks him what happened. The young man says his wife had been with another man, and that he was angry about it. The monk tells him that that is how the world of men is: other men want the same thing that he does; that sometimes one has to let go of attachments. The man brought the statue of the Buddha back in his backpack, but under it he brought a bloodied knife, with which he stabs the floor angrily.
The man paints 閉, the Chinese character for "shut" on a piece of paper, and cuts out pieces of paper with those characters and places them on his face, covering his eyes, mouth, nose and ears; a traditional "suicide" which involves suffocating oneself. The old man slowly starts noticing that something is going wrong. He looks inside and sees that man attempting to commit suicide, then he comes in with a long stick, calls the man a fool, and starts beating him — whipping him — on his bare back.
After lacerating the man's back, the monk ties him up so as to hang from a rope, with a candle warming up a point of the rope near the floor. Then the monk grabs the white cat and dips the cat's tail in black ink and starts writing with the cat's tail on the wooden floor of the part of the floating plank outside of the temple.
As he is doing so, the candle's flame is eating — by burning — a point on the rope from which the man hangs. Eventually it burns through and the man falls to the floor (he had been tied up into a ball).
The monk gives the man the knife which the man had brought and tells the man to carve out the characters which the monk has been writing on the wooden floor — "though you can so easily kill, you yourself cannot be so easily killed" — outside, in front of the doorway into the temple. The man crouches on the floor with the bloodied knife and begins carving out the first Chinese character.
He carves out the wood from under the ink, turning the characters written in black ink into carvings in wood. The man carves and the monk, holding the white cat — which feels uncomfortable and meows — writes on the floor with the cat's tail dipped in black ink. As they do so, a pair of men appear at the gate at the corner of the lake.
The monk rows his boat towards the gate, lets them on board the boat and rows back to the floating plank with the temple on top of it, where the two men can see the man they are looking for in the distance, kneeling on the wooden floor.
When they get to the boat-monastery they grab their guns and point them at the monk's novice. The man — who had been carving on the wood — stands up and makes threatening gestures at them with his knife, while he is at point blank range: the two policemen dressed like laymen can easily kill him. The master then tells his novice to keep on carving on the floor, and the man does so, turning his attention away from the guns pointed at him.
The monk tells the policemen to let the man finish carving out the letters on the wood: they are a passage of sacred text which is good at restoring inner peace. The policemen acquiesce, and ask the monk when it will be over, so that they can take him. The monk says tomorrow morning.
The policemen get a little bored, and they see a can floating by on the lake. They start shooting at the can but are unable to send a bullet through it. They shoot several times, until the monk grabs a stone and throws it — from where he is sitting (the policemen are standing and are closer to the can) — and hits the can. The policemen then stop shooting.
At night the man is still carving out letters, and it is dark, so one policeman puts away his gun in his belt and holds a candle near the man's face, so that he can see what he is carving.
The man carves all night, falling asleep as he finishes the last character. The monk grabs some blue paint and starts painting the first carved-out character: filling in the grooves with paint. The policemen start doing likewise: they use brushes and green and red paint and they paint the letters.
In the morning the man wakes up, and all the letters are painted green and blue and red. The monk tells him that it is time for him to go. As they walk away from the monastery, one policeman is about to slap handcuffs on the man's hands, but the other policeman says it is not necessary: they will just take him as he is.
After they are gone, the monk sets his robe on the floor, inside the temple, right behind the doors. He sets the robe on the floor to appear like the shadow of a person's body. Where the face should be, he sets a jug with a handle, perhaps the wooden percussive instrument. On top of the robe he puts a pair of shoes (loafers). The monk then paints "Shut" (閉) characters on paper, using a brush with black ink. He piles up wood on the center of his boat into a pagoda-like structure. He sits on the wood with the "Shut" characters pasted onto his eyes, mouth and ears, suffocating himself with will alone. He sets the pile of wood on fire, and he unplugs the hole on the floor of the boat, so that the boat starts filling up with water. Eventually he is engulfed in fire, and the boat sinks to the shallow bottom of the lake.
[edit] Winter
The gates open, and behind them, in the distance, can be seen the floating monastery, but the lake is frozen.
The man is now older. He has served his sentence. He is now free, and he has come back to the place where he grew up. He walks across the frozen lake. Everything is pretty much frozen. He grabs a hammer and a pick and starts chopping off ice. He sees the boat frozen, sunk to the shallow bottom next to the plank. The painted characters on the floor are still there. The boat is filled up with frozen water: he starts chopping off some of that ice.
He opens the doors of the temple and finds his master's clothes set out neatly on the floor, like a welcome mat (rug). He opens a drawer and finds an old book. Some pages show a person in lotus position for meditation, just like the Buddha figure. Other pages show various martial art positions. Soon the man is becoming a warrior-monk, practicing the positions in the book as if they were exercises. He practices on the frozen lake, and his breath is visible with water vapor due to the cold weather. He stretches his arms in wide circles, kicks in the air. He does a jumping kick...
One day a woman shows up. Her head is covered with a purple cloth tied around it, and she brings her child, a baby. She goes into the monastery, kneels in front of the Buddha, and prays. Her baby is on the floor next to her. The monk is behind the wooden door of his side-chamber. He opens the door — while she is praying — to take a look at her and survey her situation, then he closes the door. The woman sobs with deep grief because she is going to leave her child there. She lifts the purple cloth briefly and her black hair can be seen, but then she covers her head again and ties the cloth up tightly with a knot. She does not want her face to be seen, due to her shame.
Then she falls asleep in front of the altar, her body lying in different positions as the night passes. Then she leaves in the morning without her baby. But as she walks on the ice of the frozen lake, she keeps looking back at the monastery: not wanting to be seen. She walks briskly, without being careful where she is stepping. She fails to notice a hole in the ice. She steps into that hole...
The baby notices that his mother is missing. He crawls outside into the ice, towards the hole. The monk comes out looking for the baby. The baby has stopped in front of the hole. His mother's shoes are floating in the water of that hole. The monk notices a figure under the ice: it's a body. He draws the woman's body out from under the ice. Then her drowned body is lain supine on top of the ice. At this point, he uncovers the woman's face (not shown to viewers) and who the woman is has something to do with what the monk does next...
The monk goes into the temple, opens a small door on the wall behind the altar: the wall with the painting of the Buddha. Inside the niche there is a female statue, whose hands are giving a blessing (gesture of teaching). The statue is of Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Compassion. He takes the statue, and outside he ties a big circular stone with a hole in it, with a string to his waist. He also carries the statue with his arm around it, and he starts climbing up slopes. The climbing is slow, arduous — encumbered by the stone — and takes a long time. He treks up the mountain a very long distance.
Along the way he remembers the stones he had tied — a long time ago — to the fish and the frog, and how they had tried to swim after he had tied stones onto them. The climb proceeds and he finally reaches the peak of the mountain, from which he can see the lake and the floating monastery at its center, both small and very far away, and underneath his high vantage point.
There he joins his hands in prayer, and some distance next to him is the statue of Kwan Yin facing in the same direction: watching the monastery — and her hands in the gesture of teaching.
[edit] ... and Spring
The gates open and the lake seen behind them is no longer frozen. The baby has grown into a young boy — not very different from the monk when he was a young boy (in fact portrayed by the same actor). It is a sunny day. There is a turtle walking on the plank. The boy approaches the turtle and plays with it: the turtle hides its head in its carapace, and the boy knocks on the turtle's carapace, laughing.
Then the monk and the boy sit on the floor in front of the doors of the temple, and the monk is drawing the boy's face on a piece of paper: it is a portrait.
[edit] Trivia
- About The Set: "The hermitage that is the stage for SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER... AND SPRING is an artificially constructed set made to float on top of Jusan Pond in North Kyungsang Province in Korea. Created about 200 years ago, Jusan Pond is an artificial lake in which the surrounding mountains are reflected in its waters. It retains the mystical aura of having trees more than hundreds of years old still growing within its water. LJ Film was able to obtain permission to build the set after finally convincing the Ministry of Environment through six months of negotiations." [1]
- Director's Statement: "I intended to portray the joy, anger, sorrow and pleasure of our lives through four seasons and through the life of a monk who lives in a temple on Jusan Pond surrounded only by nature." [2] - Kim Ki-duk
