As I was reading these lines from Suji Kwock Kim's beautiful collection of poetry, I recollected a somewhat problematic moment in my writing life: once upon a time, I wrote a 15-page essay on Kim Ki-Duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring. The essay in its original form never made it into the pages of the magazine it was intended for, and did not survive a hard drive crash (the postmodern version of the autodafé). The point of this anecdote is this: there are a lot of things to talk about when we talk about Kim Ki-Duk, to parody the title of a book by Raymond Carver, but there is a strong possibility that this excess of talk to which the filmmaker seems to invite us, viewers, spectators, commentators, may end up being nothing more than superfetatory trash, meant to crash and/or burn from the start.

Nevertheless, Kim Ki-Duk's cinema invites us to speak, think, find fault or inspiration with and in what he shows and what he does not, somewhere between beauty and horror, serenity and brutality. And Time, his thirteenth film, is no exception to the rule.

A compelling meditation on what I can only call, for lack of a better expression, temps vécu (roughly speaking, time as the experience of a subjective passing), the film inspired the following thoughts: