Release date: April 2003
Three monks live in a mountain
temple: the child-monk Do-nyum, a young monk, and the elderly head monk. Do-nyum
waits for a mother he never knew, dreaming of her returning to take him home,
and chafes at the restrictions imposed on him in the temple, such as not being
able to play with the children from the nearby village. SPOILER: When a woman
comes to the temple to hold a ceremony for the death of her son, she offers to
adopt Do-nyum. The head monk then explodes with the whole sordid story of the
little monk’s origins, insisting that he must stay at the temple to atone for the
sins of his parents. The woman concurs and abandons the little boy. Eventually,
Do-nyum decides to head out into the world by himself in search of his mother.
The filmmaker has created a
clumsy mishmash (산만한 줄거리), never quite being clear whether it was a comedy or a
drama, or even quite what season it was and why certain scenes were even included.
The sound track was hideously overdramatic and intrusive: full-on
orchestra crescendos one moment, screaming cicadas the next, sometimes both
together. The one redeeming feature of the film was the breathtakingly spectacular
cinematography of Chay Chan-gu (최찬규). My take: D
Bath night
in the temple (Kim Tae-jin, Kim Min-gyo, Oh Yeong-soo).
Oh Yeong-soo would reprise the role of old monk later in 2003 in
Kim Ki-duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, ... and Spring.
