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发表于 2004-11-27 03:32
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English Reviews
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Nine-year-old Do-nyeom (Kim Tae-jin) is a boy-monk leading a quiet monastic life in one mountain temple, located somewhere in the Eastern seaboard. Do-nyeom has lived with the head priest (theater actor Oh Young-soo) as long as he remembers, and currently shares his room with a twentysomething novice Jeong-shim (Kim Min-kyo). His greatest wish is to meet his own mother, who had apparently abandoned him in the temple. When a beautiful and rich lady (Kim Ye-ryung) visits the temple to perform funereal rites for her dead son, Do-nyeom fantasizes that perhaps she can adopt him as her new son.' J3 j5 R, [9 X' ~2 E( C
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Nearly seven years were spent in completing A Little Monk. The production team seems to have suffered every imaginable form of financial difficulties that one can encounter in the course of low-budget, non-commercial moviemaking. At one point, director Joo Kyung-jung claims to have made 400 phone calls to raise mere 2,000 dollars, the lack of which had abruptly shut down the entire production. The actual lensing took only 27 days, but the schedule was so widely spread out over the years that the child-actor Kim Tae-jin physically grew up, threatening the film's narrative continuity. (This is somewhat noticeable in the finished movie) Despite these mind-boggling setbacks, A Little Monk was successfully completed and proceeded to charm audiences in the international festival circuit, receiving much praise in Shanghai, Chicago and Berlin, among other sites. Its domestic box office returns were also not bad, although the film fell short of replicating the phenomenal success of The Way Home, as some industry observers had speculated.
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A Little Monk is a little too sweet at times, but is a very honorable effort. One of the posters used in South Korea makes it look as if it is a raunchy comedy, a sort of Hi, Dharma meets Sex is Zero. Well, one subplot involving Joeng-shim's desire to have his, ahem, manhood properly circumcised, is indeed funny. Otherwise this ad campaign is pretty misleading. Beautifully photographed in various locations, including Seon-am-sa Temple in the Taebaek Mountains and the city of Yeosu, highlighting gentle, warm greens of the mountain forests, A Little Monk is actually a sincere Buddhist parable. Do-nyeom's quest for a mother figure is paralleled by Jeong-shim's efforts to overcome his "attachment" to the world of flesh, specifically painful memories of the love lost. Their faith demands that they renounce the world of flesh and realize its illusory nature, and yet the movie focuses on their weaknesses, their inability to do so. Even the head priest's faith, when it turns disciplinarian and absolutist, may in the end be a form of attachment, blocking the path toward his own enlightenment. Poor Do-nyeom's plight does tug at our heartstrings, but director and scenarist Joo (who adapted the movie from a play by Han Se-deok, reportedly much more religious in overtones) refuses to opt for an easy emotional catharsis. The Buddhist koan interspersed throughout the film are not just clever dialogues, either: they do carry weights of genuine reflections on the human suffering and meaning of life, as in the scene where the head priest asks Do-nyeom whether a boulder he sees in his favorite spot is inside or outside his heart. Overwhelmed by sadness and longing for his mother, Do-nyeom returns to the temple and answers that the boulder is outside his heart: the head priest then retorts, "If it is outside your heart, then why are your steps so heavy?" 8 ]8 r! P2 g) B6 Z! z' ?4 t
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A Little Monk is compassionate, honest, and most importantly, made with conviction. In its own modest way, this labor of love can claim a position in the distinguished lineage of Buddhist-themed cinema from South Korea, such as Im Kwon-taek's Mandala (1981) and Bae Yong-gyun's Why Did Bodhi-Dharma Leave for the East? (1989) (Kyu Hyun Kim)
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发表于 2004-11-27 02:03
