Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom) (Kim Ki-Duk, 2003)
Imdb
Date Watched: 04/13/17
Cinema or Home: Home
Reason For Watching: 13th HOF, Nestorio_Miklos's Nomination
Rewatch: No. Potential Spoilers Ahead Full disclosure: I did not go into this film with an open mind. Before watching it, I was made aware that it contained actual animal cruelty and I went into it fully expecting to be disgusted by it. Before watching the film, I also did a bit of research and discovered that the actual torture of animals is common in Kim Ki-Duk's films. I also found a video montage of various scenes of cruelty from those films, which included some scenes from
Spring, Summer that were not included in the cut of the film that I watched. Here's the link for that video
(Contains graphic, potentially disturbing content):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CrA4BIGlvqg The film attempts to convey the concepts of cruelty, lust, guilt, anger, and rebirth. Unfortunately, not all of these concepts are handled with much subtlety and the idea of cruelty and guilt in particular were hammered in ad nauseum. This is especially true of those scenes of animal torture that I was warned about, which are shown in the beginning and then repeated later in the film - intercut with scenes of the central character inflicting similar punishment upon himself, as if we the audience couldn't make the connection on our own and needed the heavy-handed reminder.
As to the nature of that brutality, let me spell it out: a child is shown torturing a fish, a frog, and a snake by tightly tying them to stones and laughing with delight as they struggle to move. Later the fish and snake are shown dead and the frog is shown still struggling. More sickening still are the scenes that were cut from the American release of the film, which is the version I watched. The American cut shows a second child tormenting a turtle by rolling it around and poking at it, merely hinting at this child's cruel nature. But the version seen elsewhere shows that child wedging rocks into the mouths of a fish, a snake, and a frog while gleefully laughing at their suffering. We see the frog - an air-breathing creature - upside down in the water, its head pulled down from the weight of the stone, kicking in a vain attempt to free itself from the object that will otherwise drown it.
While it is, of course, unclear whether the dead animals were in fact the same as those shown being abused or if they were killed specifically for the film, it is apparent that the director has little regard for the lives and safety of the animals he uses, despite the message of the film he created. And given his history of torturing and killing these kinds of animals in other films, I can only assume that he is responsible for these deaths as well.
That said, the film is not without its strengths. The cinematography is beautiful, the performances are strong, and the concept is admirable (though the execution is not). But frankly I don't give a s*** about what
Spring, Summer does right, because what it does wrong is completely unnecessary and unacceptable.
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