A stunning tale of now and Zen
The big movie news this week is Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill, Vol. 2," a glitteringly busy antihero sandwich of borrowed Eastern and Western elements. Opening much more quietly is its polar opposite, Korean writer-director Kim Ki Duk's Buddhist fable "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring." The film is as spare and unvarnished as a wooden temple floating on a lake, but its reflections run deep, and it can ripple your thoughts for months. If Tarantino's film is built to thrill, "Spring, Summer" is made to last.
The plot is deceptively simple. An aging monk (Oh Young Soo) lives in a shrine on a lake with his sole companion, a child apprentice (Kim Jong Ho). The boy, as boys sometimes will, spends one afternoon casually tormenting animals, tying rocks to a frog, a snake, and a fish. The monk responds by tying a rock to the boy's back and instructing him to rescue the animals he has burdened. Two survive but one does not, and that figurative rock will stay with the boy for a long time.
Each season is a chapter in the young monk's life, separated by a decade or so. As summer arrives, so does a sickly but attractive adolescent girl (Ha Yeo Jin), and the teenage apprentice (now played by Kim Young Min) is pulled into a raw, urgently sexual relationship. Director Kim gets the pulse of young hormones going haywire, but the film sits on the fence: We applaud the boy's ardor even as we fear where it will lead him.
And we're right to. If you know your Buddhism, you know the "noble truth" that desire is the root cause of suffering, that craving nothing is the path to everything. The young monk learns this the hard, human way, leaving the island and returning years later, still carrying that invisible stone (and played, at last, by the director himself). His aging master sets an absurd task that flowers into something monumentally pointless and profound, and while there's more, I think I'll keep it to myself. You might guess where the tale goes from here but not its sneaky, poetic impact.
Shot by cinematographer Baek Dong Hyeon in the environs of Jusan Pond, a 200-year-old man-made body of water in Korea's North Kyungsang province, "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . and Spring" has a rural beauty so timeless that it's a shock when the director drops hints that we're in the present day. The images turn pungent, hyperreal, and mythic over the course of the decades: The boat that ferries the elder monk to shore becomes both a symbol and a plain-hewn character in its own right, as does the ornamental gate on the shore, and the wintry ice that chokes both. A cat's tail becomes a calligraphy pen; a foundling child becomes a savior; the seasons swing 'round.
Films that hope to distill the essence of belief are often willfully naive and "Spring, Summer" occasionally leans too hard on its own simplicity. This is anything but a fuzzy new age bath, though. If the film is a meditation, it's the lean, unyielding sort, with muscles honed by the act of observing human struggle against a backdrop of ceaseless change. And if it doesn't offer transcendence, it shows, like a finger pointing at the moon, how we might spin toward it.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. 
