Cannes double: Poetry and My Joy

Cannes (Official Selection) – Two of the features fighting it out in the main competition at Cannes 2010, and it proves to be a case of double the movies equaling half the fun. Shortly, Paul Martin takes an unhappy trip into the Russian badlands, but first Emma Rowley attends a poetry class that just goes on and on.

Coming in at a mighty two hours and twenty-minute running time, Poetry is an epic with a haiku plotline. The story concerns Mija, a sixty-six-year-old Korean woman who decides to take a poetry class in order to write a poem for the first time. Mija is a sweet-natured, fluttery and still beautiful woman who happily quotes her daughter's words that she must have a poet's vein, since she has always “loved flowers and said odd things”. She works part-time as a maid for a well-off stroke victim and cares for her grandson, whose divorced mother lives in another city.

Poetry is essentially Mija's journey to becoming a poet, learning to look beyond her delight in pretty things to the poignant heart of life. It is quite clearly a journey that will be motivated by pain.

The film opens on a shot of a river, by which some young childen are playing. The corpse of a schoolgirl, in uniform, floats by. As the film progresses, it becomes apparent that Mija's spoilt, selfish grandson knew the girl, and was in some way involved in her death. At the same time, Mija is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Both of these revelations gradually seep into her sunny understanding of the world, teaching her to identify with the suffering of others, and finally to decide on a course of action.

Jeony-hee Yoon carries the weight of the film and the majority of the running time, and her portrayal is perfectly judged. But the story moves slowly, punctuated by readings from Mija's class and the poetry night she attends in the evenings. While these scenes eventally dovetail with the main plotline, the excessive time given to the readings and the class members' testimonies of their happiest ever moments – all of which are naïve and simply told – weighs down the central section of the film and is likely to prove trying to all but the most fascinated viewer. In truth, Poetry could easily lose half an hour or more of its runnning time and still be considered extremely gently paced.

The final scenes, in which Mija discovers where her sympathies really lie and makes up her mind to act, are beautifully done, with an elegiac power. But by then, most viewers will be picking up their belongings and looking for the cinema's exit, so we hope that Lee Chang-Dong's film meets with a talented editor before then.

Rating on a scale of 5 apples (which are better to eat than to write about): 2.5

Release date: TBC 
Directed by: Lee Chang-Dong
Written by: Lee Chang-Dong  
Cast:  Jeong-hee Yoon, Da-wit Lee, Yong-taek Kim
Rating: TBC 
Running time (mins): 139

'What's the point???' Four words and an explosion of punctuation that bring the notes made by yours truly during last night's press screening of My Joy to an unhappy conclusion. While it is often desirable to seek a route to intellectually contextualising the plot, setting and characters of a movie, by the same token it can sometimes be profitable to rely on your first, visceral reaction. And that is the route I feel compelled to take with writer-director Sergei Loznitsa's perplexing Palme d'Or entry, with there simply being no apparent point to this slow and ponderous bundle of tedium.

If only My Joy was simply dull though. It turns out to be a deeply alienating affair too, its procession of grotesque characters conveying the impression that rural Russia, where the story takes place, is populated solely by the corrupt, the stupid and the psychotic.

The film actually commences in adequate manner; the audience joining trucker Georgy (Viktor Nemets) as he hits the road on a job. Camera pulled in tightly around his characters, Loznitsa brings the haulier into contact with dirty checkpoint inspectors, a vagrant ex-soldier, and a child prostitute, only for the interest levels to sink to a miserable nadir when Georgy gets himself lost in the woods and is parted from his cargo. He is left to fend for himself in a bucolic locale, the misery-picaresque narrative seeing him encounter deeply unpleasant weirdo after deeply unpleasant weirdo.

Loznitsa must be pinching himself that this meaningless dreck has found its way into the Official Selection, but although the director might well be a mystifyingly welcome presence down on the Croisette, he will surely be far less popular back in eastern Europe, having painted a picture of Russia as a backward hell-hole populated almost exclusively by drooling lunatics.

Rating on a scale of 5 big hellos to all you truckers: 1

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Sergei Loznitsa
Written by: Sergei Loznitsa
Cast: Viktor Nemets, Olga Shuvalova, Vlad Ivanov
Rating: TBC
Running time (mins): 127