8.1 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
A sixty-something woman, faced with the discovery of a heinous family crime and in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, finds strength and purpose when she enrolls in a poetry class.
Starring: Yun Jeong-hie, Lee Da-wit, Kim Hee-ra, Ahn Nae-sang, Myeong-shin ParkForeign | 100% |
Drama | 65% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Korean: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 5.0 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
Lauded writer/director Lee Chang-dong has emerged in the last ten years as one of South Korea’s greatest filmmakers, and on August 23rd, U.S. viewers will have a chance to pick up his two most recent movies on home video, 2007’s Secret Sunshine—by way of the Criterion Collection—and last year’s Poetry, which comes to us via Kino International. Both films are beautiful, restrained, and emotionally powerful in a way that washes over you almost unexpectedly. Korean cinema in general has a tendency to veer into the melodramatic and overly sentimental, but Lee Chang-dong somehow manages to escape this particular pitfall, even when dealing with subject matter that would seem to be primed for undeservedly baroque emotion. This is especially true in Poetry, a film about an elderly woman who deals with the onset of dementia and her grief over the death of a local schoolgirl by looking for poetic inspiration in the world around her. This kind of story could be disastrously maudlin in the wrong hands, but Lee’s approach is a rather strict realism that leaves little room for excessive floweriness. The film is gentle, but not cushiony; alive with feeling, but never falsely so. You might say it lives up to its name.
I was going to make some sort of joke about Poetry in motion, but let's dispense with the bad puns and get right down to business: the 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer included here is a wonderful representation of the film's realistic aesthetic, and I doubt we could ask for much better. The image is fine-grained and, with the exception of certain darker scenes, nearly noiseless. This leaves an image that's crisp and well-defined, with a strong display of skin texture, clothing detail, and all-around clarity. Edge enhancement is never a concern, and although there are scenes where traces of light noise reduction seem to be visible, the emphasis is on "light." (No smeary, waxy, detail-erasing sludge here.) As you can tell from the screenshots, the color scheme is decidedly natural, with no stylization whatsoever, and the various hues have a good density, looking neither oversaturated nor washed out. Black levels are similarly deep, and the image has an excellent sense of contrast and depth. There were a few instances when I noticed some moiré-like shimmer on certain extremely fine textures—like some of Mija's blouses—but I spotted no overt compression problems or potential encode issues.
You don't necessarily think of quiet dramas as having particularly immersive sound design, but Poetry's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is a finely tuned expectation breaker. The film may not have booming LFE explosions or whiz-bang cross-channel effects, and it certainly doesn't have a booming, all-encompassing score—there is no score, whatsoever—but it's very clear from the first frames that much attention was paid to creating a realistic, engaging-but-unobtrusive sound space. As the film opens, the river gurgles and laps, cicadas buzz all around, chirps erupt from definable locations, and a single tweeting bird flies from left to right through the soundfield in a seamless pan. It almost sounds like you're listening to a binaural recording—you feel like you're floating along right in the middle of the river. This sense of spot-on ambience continues for just about the entire film. Every location comes alive with believable environmental noise, from light traffic sounds and convincing applause that surrounds you from all directions, to sprinkling rainfall, clamor in an arcade, and believable acoustics inside and around the church where the drowned girl's wake is taking place. There's not much need for larger-than-life bass—this isn't the kind of film where the subwoofer is activated anytime anything dramatic happens—but the dynamic range is solid, and everything sounds rich and clear. The lack of a score means that the film has to earn its emotions on its own, and it does. Dialogue throughout is clean and comprehensible, and I didn't hear any muffling, crackles, etc. Optional English subtitles are presented in easy-to-read white lettering.
If you're a fan of South Korean cinema—or great dramas in general—you'll definitely want to pick up Secret Sunshine and Poetry on the 23rd. They're both beautiful, quietly devastating portraits, and they mark writer/director Lee Chang-dong as a major international filmmaking talent. The films look and sound wonderful on Blu-ray, and they belong together on your shelf. (If your OCD shelving methods can allow Criterion and Kino titles to intermingle.) Both come highly recommended!
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