Here is a thing of true beauty; a film that defies expectations, that is grand in its simplicity. You may recall me calling other recent films beautiful, like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind or The Dreamers, but Kim Ki-Duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...And Spring is in a different league; it is not better or worse than any other film I might love, but it is set apart, on a plateau all its own.

The film is about -- well, I've fallen into a trap already, because what it is about is not the story we see on screen, nor is what we see on screen a story, in the normal sense of the word. Before I venture further, let me recommend that you stop reading this review and simply see the film, unprepared. It's simply better that way.

There are two lives running throughout the film: those of an old monk and his young apprentice. They live on a raft, floating on a lake in the middle of an idyllic Korean valley; they spend their days meditating and gathering herbs. They respect nature, and the notion of separation; a strong visual motif is that of doors, standing alone without walls and yet used consistently.

The film begins in the spring, when the boy is only five or six years old, and one day he experiments with nature, tying stones to fish, frogs and snakes and laughing as they struggle. The older man sees this and, as the boy sleeps that night, ties a heavy rock to his back; upon the boy's waking, he instructs the boy to find all the animals he tied down and release them, and that if any of them have died, he will carry their stones in his heart forever. The boy finds that the fish has died, as has the snake, and he weeps; we think the lesson has been learned, but it has not.

The autumnal season finds the boy in his adolescence, and marks the arrival of a mother and her teenage daughter at the bank of the river; they are dressed in modern clothing, and it is with some surprise that we realize that this is not a period piece. The monk and his student live in such isolation, in such rustic harmony with nature, that the notion that they exist in the present day is hard to grasp. The mother has brought her daughter to be cured of some unnamed illness. She leaves the girl on the raft. The boy, who we can assume has never seen a woman before, is thunderstruck. He tries to touch her, and she rejects him; but days or weeks or months pass (it's hard to tell), and her feelings change.

So here we have youth in the summer, and adolescence in the spring. You may have guessed from the title that the film has something to do with the passage of time; you may recall that old riddle about the times of day, and figure out that the movie is about the various stages of life. This is correct, for the most part, but the film constantly subverts our expectations as to the chronology of its seasonal metaphors; like Kieslowski's The Decalogue, each epsiode of which was about more than the single commandment from which it drew its title, the seasons of life in this film mix together and shade each other with their various qualities. And so when autumn comes, and we find that the boy is no longer on the raft, we're forced to reconsider our expectations.

Kim's direction is slow and langorous, but his images are so astonishing that one might only wish they lasted longer; it calls to mind Terrence Malick, who often seems more interested in the nature surrounding his characters than the charcters themselves. And in fact, this film is not about characters at all; there is no deft characterization, no development of character on a personal scale, for the characters in this film represent something more than themselves. They depict humanity on a level that is elemental, almost mythical, and full of mystery. Sometimes we understand why they do what they do, other times we don't; the only explanations are those that we can provide, but the film puts us in the right state of mind to find them.

There is one image in particular that I cannot get out of my head. Towards the end of the film, the lake has frozen and snow is falling, and the old man on the boat, now living only with a snake, is met by yet another visitor: a woman with a purple cloth over her face, and a baby in her arms. The cloth remains on her face, and the one time she does remove it so that she can dry her tears, the camera does not show her face. I'm not sure of this image's purpose on a literal level, nor am I settled on any specific symbolic meaning; but the notion of this face, shrouded as it is, still haunts me. It mirrors something we've already seen, a face with pieces of paper covering every orifice, each inscribed with the word 'shut;' the meaning of that image becomes clear much more quickly.

Throughout the film, I kept thinking I knew what it Kim was doing, and I was thrilled with that prospect; I thought he was making a simple, pastoral film, and was prepared to revel in its beauty; I thought he was telling the story of a young man's life, and I anticipated a film like Man On The Train, full of wisdom about life. I wondered if it would become a love story, a tragedy. It did touch on all of these things, but it was about none of them; this is a film that keeps evolving, ascending gracefully and effortlessly to new plateaus. When it reached its crescendo, its unified point, I was sure of one thing: that I had never seen anything like this before.