Seasons of change

He’s the bad boy of South Korean cinema, an upstart who didn’t attend film school or serve an apprenticeship with an established director, the usual routes to helming your own picture.

To hear Kim Ki-Duk tell it, he wrote a screenplay that a producer wanted desperately to buy. Kim held out, asking to direct. The producer resisted, but Kim held his ground. Eventually, he got his way. In 1996, his first feature was released. “Crocodile” was the tale of a man who recovers the bodies of suicides in the Han River, which runs through Seoul.

In the years since, Kim hasn’t wasted any time. His 10th film, “Samaritan Girl,” debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, winning him a best director prize. “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring,” opening in Los Angeles this month, is his ninth film, and his first to be released commercially in the U.S. outside of New York City. It’s a contemplative parable about the link between suffering and desire, between atonement and enlightenment. Its setting is a small Buddhist temple floating in the middle of a remote mountain lake. The film’s mood of tranquillity and philosophical rumination is hardly what this director is known for.

Cheng-Sim Lim, co-head of public programming at the UCLA Film and Television Archives, compares “Spring, Summer” to Im Kwon-Taek’s classic “Mandala” (1981), which is also “a parable about how one can through unorthodox means embrace Buddhist teachings.” Although the film seems to veer from Kim’s typical fare, she still spots recurrent motifs. “There’s the violent obsessive man, the female sexual subjugation,” she says.

On the international film festival circuit, Korean films have been steadily picking up prominence in the last decade. While they haven’t been distinguished the way contemporary Chinese films have by a handful of outstanding directors, they have been quick to catch up in production quality, producing audience-pleasing action thrillers and horror films.

However, the typical commercial fare was not what Sony Pictures Classics, distributor of “Spring, Summer,” was after. If anything, Sony executives had been put off by the excessive commercialism of many Korean films they’d seen, says Tom Bernard, co-president of the company. The studio was attracted to “Spring, Summer” because “this film has a very clear vision of the director.”

Born to farmers

Kim, 43, is soft-spoken, a small, compact man with closely cropped hairand a soft voice. Throughout the interview, relayed via a translator, he doodles, writing bits of questions posed and of responses readied on a Korean newspaper, which he repeatedly folds this way and that to find additional blank spaces.

Born to a family of farmers in a South Korean village, Kim got his only formal education at a primary school, one run by missionaries. Although this made him Christian for many years, these days, he admits, “I have my doubts.” He spent five years in the South Korean equivalent of the Marine Corps -- getting in even though he had been rejected by the Army when he failed a psychological test.

“I thought it was unfair so I volunteered for the Marine Corps,” he says. “I made an effort and I got in.”

Unfortunately, this bit of bravado turned into a trauma that troubles him to this day. “What I gained was physical power, and what I lost was my mind,” he says. “I’m still suffering from my memories of the Marine Corps service -- the violence, the hierarchy.”

What kind of violence? Kim skirts the question. “Sometimes I still dream about it,” he says. “In my dream I’m back in the military, in my dream I mistakenly shoot someone or I’m being beaten up by someone.” In 1991 he decided to go to France, because he had taken up painting and had heard that France was a treasure house of art. He stayed for two years, traveling and supporting himself by doing paintings and street portraiture.

It was in France, he says, that he saw his first movie. His first movie? Well, he did watch some religion-themed movies in missionary school, but he hardly remembers. What he does remember, however, was walking into a French cinema and seeing “The Silence of the Lambs.” Despite the fact that he couldn’t understand the French into which it had been dubbed, he could follow the story. Most of all he was transfixed by the images and the audio.

“I was watching the pictures and listening to the sounds,” he says. To this day, that is what films are to him, series of images and sounds, and he likes to keep speech to a minimum. “I don’t like movies with lots of dialogue.”

Thus inspired, he says, “I started to write scripts after I came back from France.” One was selected in a government-sponsored competition, another fell into the hands of an architect who wanted to produce films. After some wrangling, this man eventually gave him his first chance. Kim says that he already understood lighting, composition and angles from being a painter; the rest of it he learned by doing.

The idea for “Spring, Summer” came to him as he was pondering the suffering that is human existence. There was never a full script, he says, just a treatment. He devised scenes as he went along. He shot over a period of a year, to capture all four seasons. In the movie, spring begins as an old monk (Oh Young-soo), guardian of the temple, watches over his rascally boy trainee, admonishing him for tormenting small animals in the woods. As each season begins, the boy is older, first as a teenager, then a young man, then a grown man (played by Kim himself).

In between, he is sexually tempted when a young woman, suffering a mysterious wasting illness, is brought to the temple; when caught, he leaves with her, like Adam and Eve from Eden. Years later he returns, a desperate outlaw, having murdered in a frenzy of jealousy.

Through it all, the old monk remains calm and compassionate, seeming to comprehend the temptations of the outside world but enjoying the simplicity of his life on the lake. The lake is a real one, part of a national park, and Kim got permission from the government to build the floating temple on it. There is little dialogue, but rapt attention is paid to details and to textures, to falling leaves, to snow, to changing light. “I look at it as a series of paintings,” he says.

Kim’s other recent films, “Bad Guy” and “Samaritan Girl,” are more naked in their examination of life’s darker sides -- both revolve around prostitution, violent beatings and bloody deaths. In South Korea, Kim’s films have drifted from art house fare to commercial success, with “Bad Guy” a hit in 2002. In that film, a small-time gangster forces a young girl into prostitution; he becomes obsessed with her and she in turn begins to form an attachment to him. “Samaritan Girl” follows two schoolgirls who decide to run a prostitution scam, until one dies tragically and the other decides to “pay back” her johns as an act of remorse.

When asked about the violence in his films, Kim gets defensive, pointing the finger at the widespread violence in Hollywood films. Kim thinks people need a film like “Spring, Summer,” which he calls “a meditation.”

“I want people to think about the meaning of their life after watching this film,” says Kim, adding that he learned something himself during the year he worked on it. “While I was making this film, I realized that life isn’t all sad, life isn’t only suffering, but life is also very graceful and beautiful.”

Scarlet Cheng can be contacted at calendar@latimes.com.