Novelist, teacher, screenwriter, as well as former South Korean Minister of Culture and Tourism Lee Chang-dong digs back into his university literature degree in Poetry/Shi, from his own script. Not that the deliberate but rewarding film is first of all about the title domain of Apollo and the Muses; it deals, rather, with Ars Poetica- and cinema-“seeing well,” as the bespectacled teacher tells his class before assigning one course poem from each of the adult students, that is, to find essences beneath surfaces.

The two-and-a-third hours won Best Screenplay honors at Cannes and was selected for the London, Toronto, Telluride and New York festivals, where reviewers generally praised its unity of narrative, character and theme but overemphasized the poetry aspect, which, to use that skill’s own terms, is more vehicle (method or form) than tenor (subject or meaning), and also saw in the work a lamentation for the debasement and decline of language itself.

The weight is fully on Yun Jung-hee, her country’s Meryl Streep and voted its greatest actress, in her return after sixteen years’ retirement in Paris. She is Yang Mija, scraping by as home-care attendant to well-off stroke survivor Kang (Kim Hira) and, her divorced daughter moved to Busan, coping with surly grandson Wook (Lee David), who devours junk food and junk TV, hangs out with buddies and does nothing to help around their apartment.

In her own world, dressing up flowery for a sixty-six-year-old, Mija could do with some help. Experiencing prickliness in her right arm and forgetting everyday nouns like wallet and bleach, for which she substitutes Clorox, she dismisses the hospital diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, or dementia -- soon, they say, verbs will escape her, as well -- and believes, or pretends to, that prescribed badminton exercise will fix everything. The “sensitive one” among her deceased siblings, she needs her dreaminess to rise above the mundane crassness of the concrete-drab Seoul satellite.

Added woes come in relation to the schoolgirl suicide whose body, discovered by children, floats down the Han to opening credits. Agnes, sixteen-year-old Park Heejin, jumped from a rural traffic bridge because what began as consensual sex with two classmates had turned into repeated rape in an empty school lab by six boys, including unconcerned and unrepentant Wook. No one else is very upset, either, for education and government officials meet only to keep this civic black eye from media sensationalizing.

South Korea’s world is presented as male-dominated, and the fathers of the five other young culprits bring Mija into their business confidence and jostle to buy off the dead girl’s mother with thirty million won, five from each of them. Kibum’s father (Ahn Nae-sang) is entrusted with enlisting Mija to deal with the bereaved mother.

Going about her own life, Mija has on a whim kindled her “poetic vein -- I do like flowers and say odd things” -- as a late sign-up at a cultural center poetry class. Jotting impressions in a feminine notebook, she is unable, however, to begin putting on paper her one poem. In subtitle translation at least, fellow students’ haiku-short verses are nothing striking and the aspiring poets are more creative in talking about their adulterous loves and new apartments. Similarly, at an amateur poets’ club, the biggest hit is policeman Park, who talks mostly about his male organ.

SPOILER ALERT

Mija leaves her job when Kang sneaks Viagra and asks for sex so that he can be a man one last time. When she does go back, it is from compassion and not for the money she will need. She alone attends religious services for Agnes’ soul, and when she is taken to bargain with the now-calm mother -- earlier maddened with grief in the hospital parking lot -- she does not chicken out so much as lose track of her venal errand in the sight, taste and meaning of juicy fallen apricots.

Mija (actress Yun’s real name) is alone, an odd duck in a money-conscious society, and since she speaks little and to no one, her motivation is left to be conjectured. Did she have anything to do with a not totally unsympathetic Detective Parks’s reappearance, and is there significance in her windblown hat’s falling to the river? The poem which cost her so much is “Agnes’ Song,” which she leaves for another to read to the class while, on the bridge, her voice and figure morph into those of that young girl, who looks and smiles.

Throughout, characters do not face, or speak to, the camera, but a little up and to the side. So, too, director Lee refuses eye-to-eye direct answers, instead allowing “empty space [which] can be filled in by the audience [from] perhaps sufficient hints.” As with the art of poetry, the viewer-reader must work to see into the heart of things.

(Released by Kino International; not rated by MPAA.)