Spring Summer Fall Winter and Spring (Movie)

A stunning tale of now and Zen

A Bumpy road to adulthood -- and to enlightenment

It's a Buddhist fable made to last, a masterful portrait of the seasons of a life. Combining visual luster and stunning emotion, it endorses the heartening idea that a spirit needs not be pristine to be worthy. The film is as spare and unvarnished as a wooden temple floating on a lake, but its reflections run deep, and it can ripple your thoughts for months.

The plot is deceptively simple. Each season is a chapter in the young monk's life, separated by a decade or so.

In Buddhism, we know the "noble truth" that desire is the root cause of suffering, that craving nothing is the path to everything. The young monk learns this the hard, human way, leaving the island and returning years later, still carrying that invisible stone. As the symbolic door represents self-respect more than religious reverence. By circumventing it, the young man is ultimately betraying himself.

Shot in the environs of a 200-year-old man-made body of water in Korea's North province, "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . . and Spring" has a rural beauty so timeless that it's a shock when the director drops hints that we're in the present day. The images turn pungent, hyperreal, and mythic over the course of the decades: The boat that ferries the elder monk to shore becomes both a symbol and a plain character in its own right, as does the ornamental gate on the shore, and the wintry ice that chokes both. A cat's tail becomes a calligraphy pen; a foundling child becomes a savior; the seasons swing 'round as cyclic existence in samsara.