A group of young boys play in the rocks and dirt near the Hangang river.

The camera zeros in on one of the boys watching something in the water. As it pivots and follows his sight line, we are not sure if he’s watching anything; the object is so faint, caught up in the small waves. It floats closer—then closer—and we can see it’s the body of a girl, her school shirt a soft, white balloon. The back of her head looks bloody. The camera pans back to the young boy standing just back from the edge of the river. He scrunches his face. And though he knows what to do, he’s not sure he can do it. But she’s been found, and so it begins. Her name was Agnes.

Poetry unfolds like a poem. It’s a story of flow, life exiting and entering at all internal milestones and edges. Characters seem present in all their life stages, showing layers of maturity and internal movement. Even Agnes enters as she exits, and life begins to center around what happened to her.

The central character, Mi-ja, played by the prolific actor Yoon Jeong-hee, is a charming, sweet woman in her sixties caring for her daughter’s insolent high school son, played by Lee Da-wit. Here, women do not rule; Mi-ja cooks and cleans for him, allowing him to live with little consequence or responsibility. She is also a maid and caregiver to an elderly rich man in town who has had a stroke. Yet no matter her circumstances, she responds to each person in her life with caring and grace. It’s a dynamic that gets played out consciously or unconsciously in most households; women caring and lifting up boys and men as if they are supporting something great to come. Women give themselves away, in the hopes that others will see how invaluable they are.

However, we begin to understand that Mi-ja is more layered than she lets on when she signs up for a month-long poetry class at her local community center. All her classmates sit enthralled as their professor speaks, knowing that they have embarked on some great mystery. How do you write a poem?

Yet at the beginning of Mi-ja’s late-stage individuation, she receives an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and experiences an attempted rape by her elderly charge. Life and its stressors converge all at once – and you can almost see a bit of a terrifying clarity in her face when she learns from some of the town’s fathers that her grandson and their sons were all raping Agnes before she jumped off the bridge into the dark, grey river. Still, Mi-ja wants to write a poem.

All writers wonder aloud about the thing they want to write, yet they always feel like it’s just out of reach. We buy books and take workshops, like Mi-ja, but we cannot will our dreams into fruition. As Mi-ja enters into this new way of thinking, you see her looking to others on how to walk, and how to use her voice. She sits pondering trees, and her practical and tottering neighbor inquires after her like she is steeped in lunacy. She asks again, How do I write a poem? to a poet at a reading and gets close to the answer. The small poems arrive bit by bit, and you can tell she has a poet’s sensibility, but she’s just learning to crawl here. She’s learning life, how life is, how life works.

She starts to dip her toe in the proverbial river; first by trying to shake a confession from her grandson. Then she tries the fathers’ way of working it out – they want to pay off the dead girl’s mother to make it go away, to save the boys’ futures. In one scene, she’s pushed by one of the boys’ fathers to visit the girl’s mother and convince her to take the money (the mother originally refused). But she gets caught up in the beauty of the mother’s farm, the luscious apricots on the ground, and she forgets what she was there for. The way of others is not her path, because she has started to learn that life is not a transaction, but an exchange. A volley, much like the scenes of her and her grandson hitting a badminton birdie back and forth.

In poetry, the word stanza comes from the Italian word for room. When Mi-ja sees the lab room where Agnes was raped, she peers over the window sill and through the glass. Rooms, in this film, become a place for understanding, for growth, in all its forms, good or tragic. Where in this room was Agnes raped? It was contained here, much like the lines in a stanza.

The poetry classroom is the collective wanting to move toward the edge.

The grandson curled up in his bed, in his room, unable to reckon with what he had done.

Mi-ja has become a poem, something beautiful yet misunderstood, and someone struggling to comprehend her unfolding life. Yet this is a fundamental truth in poetry; to write, to understand, you must allow yourself to see. In the words of Clarissa Pinkola Estés, “It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know.”

But no one is here to stand in for Mi-ja in her dark hour, so she relies on herself to make a series of decisions. And though she cannot completely leave her duties, she sets off to reframe or transition in a kind of movement from room to room, stanza to stanza.

One of the first moments she starts to awaken is when the elderly man she is caring for attempts to sexually assault her. She fights back, admonishes him, and quits. But later she returns because she has hatched a plan to have sex with and blackmail him, so she can pay off Agnes’s mother. The sex scene is in a tub, and she mounts him. She becomes “birthed” here, much like babies born in water. Her blackmailing him has nothing to do with what she thinks is right – she is tying up loose ends. She’s making a plan to be free, and she seizes a moment women rarely do. The birdie was stuck in the tree, but only she can loosen it.

Yet she asks the wrong question; there’s no way to write a poem. It’s an alchemist’s trick, and through Mi-ja’s grief for her family, her ultimate decline, and Agnes, the poem arrives when she’s sitting by the river. The rain, like tears, falls on a page in her notebook. The rain becomes the tears becomes the words. She calls the daughter home, she continues to volley the birdie as her grandson is arrested, the girl’s mother is paid off, and now she can write her own ending, and write the poem she thought she didn’t know how to write – of the grief and unfairness in life, and even if we only make a small leap, we all must transition, one way or another.

Agnes’s Song by Lee Chang-dong Translated from Korean to English

How is it over there? How lonely is it? Is it still glowing red at sunset? Are the birds still singing on the way to the forest? Can you receive the letter I dared not send? Can I convey… the confession I dared not make? Will time pass and roses fade? Now it’s time to say goodbye Like the wind that lingers and then goes, just like shadows To promises that never came, to the love sealed till the end. To the grass kissing my weary ankles And to the tiny footsteps following me It’s time to say goodbye Now as darkness falls Will a candle be lit again? Here I pray… nobody shall cry… and for you to know… how deeply I loved you The long wait in the middle of a hot summer day An old path resembling my father’s face Even the lonesome wild flower shyly turning away How deeply I loved How my heart fluttered at hearing faint song I bless you Before crossing the black river With my soul’s last breath I am beginning to dream… a bright sunny morning… again I awake blinded by the light… and meet you… standing by me.

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