Reviewed by David Levinson

CHATTING in a café in Paris during Linklater's Before Sunset, the focus between Jessie and Celine slowly cocoons from one throwaway philosophical gesture to another. At one point, after discussing the rising urban terror climate, Celine mentions how a trip abroad helped empty her of spiritual clutter. The conversation then inevitably topples into Buddhism and the elimination of desire, and the two manage to nicely articulate something that's plaguing about its ethos: what do you do when you reach the very apex? There's a thin line between living in a sealed bubble of bliss and Prozac-induced inertia...


Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring doesn't exactly address that question, but at the very least it's a step away from the hyper-mediated landscape of monks clad in orange and chanting. Coming off the heels of what has been dubbed Korea's "Cinema of Cruelty" – a potpourri of dismembered limbs, hollow eye sockets, misplaced teeth &c&c spearheaded by the likes of Park Chan-wook – the prospect of Kim Ki-duk doing Buddhism is like trying to force two equivalently-charged magnet poles together. And yet it works – almost effortlessly – thanks to the way he manages to incorporate our capacity for violence into the Grueling Journey Towards Spiritual Nirvana.

The idea of tracing a cyclical path through life has become so well trodden that its appearance is almost meaningless, a giveaway when sightseeing for symbolism. But Kim skewers, rotates and sets it to char: the opening chapter, Spring, has a student forced to come to terms with his actions after he sets about torturing various animals by tying each to a rock. Upon finding that two of the three have died, he slips into a storm of tears, his moist, contorted face a disarmingly pathetic Zen-ism. Pretty standard stuff. But when coupled with the epilogue-of-sorts, ... and Spring, it's almost nullified by the sight of a new disciple gleefully batting about a tortoise – cruelty looped, devouring its own tail.

In its violently picturesque beauty – almost all of the narrative takes place around a mist-coiled lake, stacked by mountains overrun with foliage – the film occasionally threatens to become a wall fixture. Of course, that kind of flaky ethereality is half the point – as the elder monk intones at point, there's one degree of separation between want and murder, with love, funnily enough, as the missing link. But I'm not sure that Kim agrees – or, at the very least, he acknowledges that balance is more a case of rigorous self-preservation than pure abandonment, stringing up an haute tension between carnal pleasure and its transcendence. It's all in the image; and while I could've gone without the sight of, say, the young disciple having his way – real horrowshow like – atop some boulders, its glorious unprofessionalism reeks of that earthy physicality that binds us to the world. Even when Kim can't quite manage to contain his taste for sadism, it's fostered more within the idea of the body as a temple, self-violation bringing with it the punishment of, uh, beatings. As such, life becomes an endless drawl of action and consequence, peaking (quite literally) with a redemptive climb through the snowy enfolds. The tiger roars, the snake slithers – and even if just for a moment, we manage to glimpse something bigger than ourselves.