Exceptional ‘Poetry’ rides waves of emotions

In a nondescript South Korean city, a 66-year-old woman of unusually delicate features, who works part-time as a maid and caretaker, is coping with the encroachment of Alzheimer’s. She is also taking a poetry class at the local cultural center.

In the absence of her daughter, who lives and works in another town, she is raising her grandson, a sullen, barely communicative teenager typical in some respects but grimly exceptional in others.

Along with five male classmates, the grandson has been accused of raping a female student who subsequently killed herself. In the opening scene of “Poetry” – which may well be the film of the year – the body is discovered floating downstream by children playing on the riverbank.

The grandmother, Mija (played by the heartbreaking Yun Jung-hee), must choose a difficult path: Either she joins the fathers of the accused boys in paying considerable hush money to the dead girl’s mother, or she follows her fledgling poetic instincts toward a different solution.

This is a small film, and also a great one, the most supple and satisfying narrative picture I saw last year at the Cannes Film Festival.

The writer-director is Lee Chang-dong, whose previous, more unruly but equally striking “Secret Sunshine” also made a splash at Cannes. In that film, an ordinary woman’s extraordinary emotional setbacks led to a spiritual quest of haunting complication.

In “Poetry,” an ordinary woman’s extraordinary emotional setbacks lead in another direction, toward a series of inquiries and discoveries, and a resolution both complete and suggestively open-ended.

Putting words on paper does not come easily for Mija, who has sacrificed much and has been rewarded somewhat meagerly by her relations and society. Where, she wonders throughout “Poetry,” does poetic inspiration come from? Is the old cliché true, that only personal reflection and suffering will bring the muse?

As Mija struggles with the toughest decision of her life, she enters into a kind of psychic relationship with the victim, the girl so badly used in life and so cruelly dismissed by the boys’ fathers in death.

“Poetry” is practically unclassifiable. On the one hand, the narrative does most of the work for you; it’s spare but more than enough to get you hooked. On the other, what makes it exceptional is everything going on in between the narrative lines.

Lee has equated the much-predicted death of poetry with what he sees as the imminent demise of film. His film leaves no choice but to disbelieve him on both counts.