Rainwater Falling From a Gutter

     Yesterday, inspired by efforts of the two Koreas to find common ground through real diplomacy, in spite of the current erratic policy and traditionally brutal heavy-handedness of the United States toward the peninsula it blasted to smithereens in the 1950s, I watched a South Korean film.

     Mandala, directed by Im Kwon-taek, from 1981, is a beautiful widescreen film about two wandering Buddhist monks in modern Korea.  One of them, Pobun, is young and ascetic, tormented by a sad childhood and by a past crime he committed, raping a young woman who happens to also be an occasional love interest of the older monk, Jasin.  The two wander, as Jasin puts it, in "meditation through traveling."  

     For Jasin, a heavy drinker, the Buddha is in the alcohol bottle, not just in the temple.  His method is to conquer lust, for example, by having sex.  Conquering drinking by indulging in drunkenness.  He criticizes the Buddha's serene smiling expression on statues, commenting that as a real person living in this world long ago, he encountered suffering people, diseases, dying children.  The Buddha would not, Jasin maintains, have felt tranquil when faced with the darknesses and difficulties of life.  Jasin carries with him a wooden figurine of the Buddha he carved several years before, a simple sculpture showing a rough, plain Buddha's face.  

     Pobun, more traditionally minded, has a harder time dealing with the world than does his companion.  Abandoned by his mother when he was a child, he seeks her out in the end, just to see her once before moving on, committed to the wandering meditation so well-practiced by Jasin, who meets a mundane, alcohol-related end one frigid night.

     The story's simplicity is countered by the presentation of thought-provoking imagery, of dissolves, of moments of startling beauty--wide vistas of countryside with a lone figure or two moving almost imperceptibly.  The dynamic chaos of the metropolis, Seoul, stands for the temptations and noises of the world outside the ordered quiet of the monastery Pobun starts out in, but leaves due to his restless inner turmoil.

     An artfully assembled film, Mandala is the work of a prolific director, Im Kwon-taek (born 1936), maker of over a hundred movies, many of them, in his first two decades as a filmmaker, genre pictures quickly made.  In an interview he said he wished he could burn his early work, "but they're out there," and there's nothing he can do about it.  He got into filmmaking from the ground up in 1955, because, in the Korean War's aftermath, he needed work and he was hungry.  Starting his career without artistic ambitions, he grew into a great artist capable of making this beautiful film.  I've seen only this one film of his so far, but I can tell his efforts are worth watching.  

     I saw Mandala on YouTube, a good-looking print of it.  I recommend it for its accurate depiction of the Buddhist philosophy and also for the strength of its technique and artistry, as well as a good introduction to a great filmmaker you may have never heard of.

                                                                              Vic Neptune