Movie Enthusiast Issue 35: Faith on Film (Again)
Without planning it I’ve recently seen a couple of movies where faith is a central element of the story. I’ll start with the most recent, since it’s fresh on my mind.
In Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine, the recently widowed Shin-ae moves with her young son from Seoul to the small, conservative town of Miryang (which, translated into English, gives us the film’s title). She sets up shop as a piano teacher (she is, unfortunately, not very good) and goes around telling everyone about the land she plans on buying with money she doesn’t actually have. One night she come home from a night out on the town with her gal friends and learns that her son has been kidnapped for a large ransom. She deposits the requested bag-o-cash in an appointed dumpster. As a reward, her son’s body turns up in a river.
Hit with the double tragedy of losing both son and husband and with literally nothing else to lose at this point, Shin-ae takes up the friendly neighborhood pharmacist’s advice to start going to church. In one of the film’s approximately 16 extravagantly distressing scenes, Shin-ae loses control of body and soul as Jesus pierces the heart she had previously not allowed anyone to stir. Shin-ae is born again and positively aglow.
The shrewd viewer knows exactly where this is going. Equipped with the Gospel message, she excitedly tells her women’s prayer group of her plan to visit her son’s kidnapper-murderer in prison to forgive him, just as God would want her to do. Surprise! Turns out the dude has also let Jesus into his life. He informs Shin-ae with a mirror image of her own spiritual calm that God has already forgiven him; He’s beaten her to the punch. Shin-ae does not take this news well and spends the rest of the film trying petulantly to get even with God for being God and loving all His creation indiscriminately.
The writer and director of this movie maintain a fair tone throughout the film. Despite Shin-ae’s journey of discovery and rebellion vis-à-vis the Christian faith (or at least what is presented to her as such), none of the religious characters in the film, or even religion itself, are presented in a mocking or disparaging way. The conclusion suggests that the filmmakers’ own attitudes toward religion and faith are less than sympathetic, but in getting there a fair shake is given to those forms of organized belief that attempt, however successfully or not, to help humans grapple with the unspeakable tragedy of living.
Movies like Secret Sunshine always have the strange and possibly unintended consequence of helping me through my own periods of spiritual discomfort by reminding me of what I don’t believe. The frustration that results from watching characters attempt to navigate a chaotic world with faulty theology helps me to better compels me to articulate for myself what I think they’ve gotten wrong and how they’ve gone astray from the real purpose of the Christian faith.
A few days before watching Secret Sunshine, I saw a restoration of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker in theaters. Even though Tarkovsky and I are speaking the same theological language (which is to say Eastern Orthodoxy), the movie made less of an impact on me (in a certain sense; in terms of imagery, it’s peerless except within Tarkovsky’s filmography). When his characters discuss the weight of faith and acknowledge how faith can often make us uncomfortable, I just kind of nod along. Tell me something I don’t already know.
I am perhaps highly abnormal in this sense, at least among film critics—many of whom are given to discuss the works of Tarkovsky, Malick, or any other high-aiming “spiritual” director with a reverent awe that stops short of the Rilkian imperative to change their lives. I think Secret Sunshine is a good movie in spite of the kind of religion it depicts; I think Stalker is a fine movie irrespective of presenting ideas that flatter my own theological convictions. I’ve noticed with some critics the the script is somewhat different, and usually more limited in its scope. Movies that show the consequences of mass delusions-qua-organized religions with clarity and fairness are laudable for illuminating the “truth” about the nature of faith; movies that present mysterious, discomforting ideas about faith are laudable only insofar as they instill a vague sense of spirituality. This strikes me as an inadequate heuristic for how to think about God or questions of faith.
But there’s another inadequacy at play in this conversation. Both Stalker and Secret Sunshine—in addition to The Wedding Plan and Beyond the Hills, two others that I recently saw and easily could have talked about here instead—run up against an especially problematic constraint on any film that attempts to depict or grapple with faith: limited runtime. Faith is lifelong, not easily or accurately adaptable to the dictates of a two-hour-long movie and three act story structure (Kierkegaard: “Faith [in ancient days] was then a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that proficiency in believing is not acquired either in days or in weeks.” St. Paul: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”) Perhaps what cinema is lacking is a film that captures the experience of faith in its fullness. Is this an inherent limitation of the medium? Will we someday get a filmmaker who can adequately dramatize a full life of faith onscreen?
Or is such a movie even needful?