On what makes Lee Chang-dong's Poetry (2010) one of the great films about art and aging.

Poetry follows Mija, a 66-year-old woman who begins taking a poetry class while simultaneously discovering that she may have early-stage Alzheimer's and that her grandson has been complicit in a serious crime.

The film is about what it costs to create beauty in an ugly world, and about what it means to see clearly. Mija's poetry class asks her to look at the world around her and find what is beautiful in it. Her investigation into the crime asks her to look at the same world and find what is true in it. These are not the same act.

The final sequence of the film — which I will not describe — is one of the most formally daring endings in contemporary cinema. It does something with point of view that requires the film to have established a specific grammar over its preceding two hours. When it breaks that grammar, the break is the meaning.

Yoon Junghee's performance is one of those performances that you can watch in almost any frame and find something precise and real. She received no major international award for this role and that's the single largest injustice in the awards history of the last fifteen years.