TheGline's Full Review: Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?
Bae Yong-Kyun's Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left For The East? is not the sort of movie that most people would break down the doors to see, I imagine. It has no gunplay, no Oscar-bid acting, no explosions, no CGI, no rubber monsters, no Ahnuld or Stallone or Jackie Chan or any other Hollywood actors for that matter, and exactly one drop of blood. It is, however, one of the most haunting and subtly powerful movies I have ever seen. I don't think I'll ever forget it.
Yong-Kyun, the director, is a professor of visual arts in Korea, and nominally not a filmmaker. With one camera and a few non-professional actors (everyone in the film is more or less playing themselves), he spent five years making this film in South Korea's mountains. It seems like it was made frame-by-frame -- there is a level of meticulousness and care in every single shot that isn't present in most other movies. No shot is wasted -- everything is included for a reason, and the shots are often held in such a way that we stop just looking at what we're seeing and are encouraged to meditate on it. Many of the images are lovely, of course, but the prettiness of the image is often not the point. In this sense, the film is Zen: it is as much a story as it is a vehicle through which we can find meanings of our own.
The story isn't complicated on the face of it, but like 2001 (another movie remarkably like this one), it conceals vast depths. A young man leaves society at large to become a Buddhist monk in a secluded monastery. There he cares for the two other residents -- a young orphan and an aging priest. We learn (in a flashback that at first does not appear to be a flashback) that he was caring for his blind and invalid mother, and did not want to abandon her. We also learn that the old priest is dying, and that it will be the young monk's responsibility to care for him.
The boy also has dilemmas of his own: he impulsively wounds a bird with a rock (which falls into a stream), and then attempts to care for it. As if in retribution for his violence, he is playfully dunked under the water by other boys, but then surrenders and finds that he floats rather than drowning -- a wonderful metaphor for the surrender of the self required in Buddhist thinking.
The film is not about plot, but about images and feelings. Zen Buddhism uses paradoxes and calculated imagery to convey a sense of what it is all about, and the film does much of the same thing. When we see someone sitting and meditating, it is skillfully intercut with another series of images that hold our attention in such a way that we begin to empathize with the meditator rather than simply watch him.
Many people will not find this film interesting. That's a shame, because such attitudes say far more about the person in question than about the film. A shallow person will never find the film interesting; an interesting person will never cease to find things in it. Too many people, including a good many patient and observant moviegoers, have had their attention spans atrophied by the rat-tat-tat pacing of most films. They can't sit through a film like this; they get restless and impatient. They want to have a plot handed to them; they want something to happen. They expect conflicts and crises to burst out at them and announce themselves. Bodhi-Dharma doesn't work like that.
Bodhi-Dharma came out of nowhere, more or less, to almost unanimous critical praise, and has since jumped into the Sight & Sound Top 10 Of All Time list. There is something intimidating in how a film can lionize so many people's attention so quickly, but seeing is believing.
Bae Yong-Kyun's Zen masterpiece. Acclaimed by critics and audiences throughout the world, "Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?" is simply one of t...More at Walmart
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