Nancy’s Reads & Reels: Poetry, the Movie & Unbroken, the Book

I was reluctant to settle down with Poetry, the movie, and its two hours and 19 minutes of subtitles. I put it off for days but, with nothing better to watch, I slipped it in the DVD and settled in for a Korean movie directed by Lee Chang-dong and starring Yoon Jeong-hee — ring a bell, I didn’t think so.

Poetry is deemed by some to be an almost perfect movie and has won many awards.

The movie begins with a body floating face down in a river. The movie ends with a poem and a young woman, seen from the back, on a bridge over the same, we assume, river. In between these two events unfolds a complicated story.

Mya is a 66-year-old woman who is diagnosed with the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s, but she nevertheless signs up for a poetry writing class. The teacher asks the class to write one poem.

There are so many threads to tie together and at first you can’t see where the story is going but if you stick with it, all will become clear.

I’m still thinking about this movie and days after I watched it a certain plot point became clear: Mya goes to a poetry slam at a nightclub and meets a policeman. Later she is shown outside the club crying and the policeman comes over to her and asks her why she’s crying. At the end of the movie she is outside her apartment building playing badminton with her grandson who lives with her — a car pulls up. The policeman she met at the poetry slam gets out with another man. The man pulls Mya’s grandson aside and the policeman begins playing badminton with her and then the other man puts the grandson in the car and both men drive away with the grandson. That should give you some idea of how thought-provoking Poetry is.

In Unbroken, the book, Laura Hillenbrand does an incredible job obtaining countless interviews with Louis Zamperini and others in recounting his WWII survival under almost unimaginable circumstances. Though Ms. Hillenbrand is ill she pulls it all together. 

Perhaps the fact that Zamperini participated in the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a runner made him able to physically survive the punishment he received at the hands of his captors and before that seven weeks floating around the Pacific in a leaky raft with almost no food or water.

Zamperini grew up in Calif. and in 1943 enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He was assigned to fly bombing missions in a B-24. The plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Zamperini and two others survived but one dies before Zamperini and the other man are captured by Japanese soldiers.

The story of Zamperini’s early life didn’t interest me as much as his experience after the plane crash, as a prisoner of war and his difficult re-entry into civilian life. Until now, I hadn’t given much thought to what a POW in a Japanese camp might have gone through and so I learned a lot. Only one in three POWs survived capture by the Japanese. America has forgotten but understandably the Japanese are sensitive on the subject.