Older woman with dark hair in a light shirt holding a red apple up in her raised hand, looking toward it in a dim room
Credit: Kino Lorber
In - by Milo Garner

The Disintegrating Language of Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry

You’re occasionally forgetting words for now, but gradually your memory will worsen. At first you won’t recall nouns, then verbs. You know verbs, right? Of course I know verbs. But nouns are the most important. Right. Nouns are most important. This exchange occurs around the halfway point of Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry. Mi-ja has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Earlier in the film, she grasps failingly for the words “electricity” and “wallet.” This disintegration of vocabulary represents in some ways the film’s theme: a...

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