| The DVD |
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I'm unhappy to report that Columbia Tri-Star's North American DVD presentation of the awe-inspiring Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is merely serviceable. In addition to a meagre helping of supplements (trailers for Zhou Yu's Train, Carandiru, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, Broken Wings, and Young Adam--the first two of which also precede the main menu), the disc disappoints with a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that suffers from a digitally zoomed-in appearance, which causes ghosting artifacts that wreak havoc on shots containing a lot of texture. In the darker passages of the "winter" segment, this smearing effect disappears, only to be replaced by a coarse, video-ish grain. On the plus side, the source print betrays no debris, and the Korean Dolby Digital 5.1 mix sounds like a well-recorded relaxation tape. A pronounced left-right split in the front mains creates the not-inappropriate impression that you're watching the movie through a window as opposed to seeing it on a TV screen; too bad, then, that the image isn't more tactile.-
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The Film
Korean Kim Ki-duk's personal religious odyssey Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (hereafter Spring) succeeds, and brilliantly, in telling its story with a bare minimum of dialogue and embellishment while recognizing, too, that nature is the first testament of the human condition. Finding joy in cycles, it sees the evolution of an individual from innocence through cruelty, love, and wisdom as a ritual as inevitable as the progression of the seasons. Viewed from a position of spiritual remove, life unfolds here as a dance of intricate, carefully choreographed steps that is only completely knowable at dance's end. Ki-duk's and cinematographer Baek Dong-hyeon's visuals are magnificent, with the entire film unfolding on an island in the middle of an impossibly placid lake, untouched and theoretically untouchable by the outside world as an old monk teaches a child what it means to be human.
The undercurrent of cruelty that defines the eternal struggle in the human beast is a topic familiar to Ki-duk, whose last film released in the United States, the remarkable The Isle, functions as a telling companion piece to his Spring. Also set on an island, also dealing in an oblique way with how sin follows us like an odour or a stain and how nature is the only reliable guide for the ways of man and beast, The Isle is, in its explicit gore and sex, as blunt in its way as Spring's simple causality. There is sex and death in Spring, cruelty and even sadism in the relationship between the characters and their charges. Misidentified as gentle, the picture approaches conflict in a better way.
It's an act of great humanism to allow humanity its flaws, to compare the beauty of Spring's settings to that of an individual, or to recognize that there is a heart of darkness and nihilism seething in each. Balance isn't a denial of evil, it's an acceptance of it as an equal in embracing the shadow as it were, thus in each of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring's five segments, one finds equal time allotted to corruption and redemption. The aspirations of the mind, the limitations of the body, all of it is re-absorbed into the loam at the moment of revelation.- (excerpted from a longer review found here)
© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author. |
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DVD GRADES:
Image B-
Sound A |
DVD VITALS:
Running Time
102 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
1.85:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
Korean DD 5.1
CC
No
Subtitles
English, French
DVD-9
Region One
Columbia Tri-Star
Buy SPRING... posters at Moviegoods (click on image)
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Published: September 2, 2004
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