Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring: Temptation island

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring is beautifully obvious

By Jeannette Catsoulis

If the Humane Society ever gets wind of the new Korean film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring, demonstrations will be the least of it. In service to the film's moral lessons, so many nonhumans are methodically mistreated--including a poor little puss whose tail is soaked in ink and used as a calligraphy brush--I am forced to conclude that the Korean animal rights movement is not quite as vigilant as it might be.

Yet despite the normally extreme sensitivity of Americans to beastie welfare, Spring is not only a resounding hit with our national critics but was a nominee for best foreign language film at this year's Academy Awards. Everyone, it seems, is thoroughly bamboozled by the film's ravishing cinematography and hyper-religious atmosphere. As Mel Gibson has clearly proven, you can get away with a lot of sick behavior and twisted ideas if you hide them beneath the cloak of a spiritual journey.

But my dislike of the film has little to do with its treatment of animals and everything to do with its view of humans. The action takes place entirely in and around a tiny Buddhist temple floating serenely on a lake and surrounded by snowcapped mountains. Divided into five seasonal segments, the life cycle of a male child, raised in the temple by Old Monk (Oh Young-Soo), is played out almost wordlessly, accompanied by a score of disaster-movie proportions.

In the Spring segment, we see the child chasing butterflies, picking herbs and painfully experiencing his first lesson on the Golden Rule. In Summer, tranquility is disrupted when a sickly--but of course beautiful--young girl arrives in search of spiritual restoration. Now a young man of 17 (played with exuberant horniness by Seo Jae-Kyung), our hero is happy to oblige in a way probably not sanctioned by conventional Buddhist counseling techniques. But after such paradisiacal sex, there must be a fall; and the Autumn segment reveals the harsh punishment reserved for those unable to control their carnal desires. By Winter, however, the man (now played by the director himself, Kim Ki-Duk) is purified and ready to begin the cycle anew.

Little more than a stripped-down morality play riddled with obviousness, Spring is nevertheless hypnotically beautiful. Kim has the eye of an artist (he once sold paintings on the streets in the South of France), and while his films have never done well in his home country, the director has experienced huge critical success internationally. Raised Christian but familiar with Buddhist philosophy, Kim's guiding precept is that all human energy comes from male-female conflict--a view expressed at its most extreme in 2001's notoriously violent The Isle, also a floating world but this time of prostitution. "The relationship between men and women is itself a kind of prostitution, even if no money does change hands," he stated in a 2001 interview. "Women...have something to offer that men always need."

Kim may or may not be angry about his sexual dependence, but audiences should see his films and decide for themselves. Spring is a comparatively subdued example of his work, though there are some serious purification rituals (the final act of contrition is, amazingly, performed by Kim himself without any visual trickery) and a disturbing sequence played out by a woman whose face is suffocatingly wrapped in a thick scarf. But the most troubling aspect of the film is its message that sexual desire inevitably leads to violence--a belief literally stated by Old Monk, and no different from that of any slasher movie. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring may arrive cloaked in Buddhist theory but its presumptions are more Halloween than hallowed.