The Bell Tower: Missing Another Dawn, Memories in the Belfry

When we look back at our lives can it be in any way except with sadness? For the joys of life are passing and don't etch themselves in our minds as deeply as the griefs do. In Yang Jun-nam's The Bell Tower: Missing Another Dawn, the bittersweet reflections are those of an old and ailing bell-maker (Heo Jang-kang) who experiences love and loss, not quite in equal measure. His fiance (Moon Jeong-suk) dies of appendicitis; his teacher dies of old age; what could be a career breakthrough is derailed by an old rivalry involving his grandfather. And yet, he soldiers on.

He has a new helpmeet (Moon, again), a nomadic spirit, and his craft. Fatherhood too comes into play but at a steep price. One gets the feeling every gift has its cost. And who hasn't felt that way at times. It's one of the things that redirects us back to work, to craft, to art. In a world in which the karmic balance feels arbitrarily applied by a whimisical, distracted deity, the practice — whatever that means to you — may be the place of most control. That and the telling of the story. The two are necessarily separate. And that's what makes The Bell Tower so good. Yang — Cheong Nam and Kang No-hyang — understand that the best lives are those which reconcile these two components. The work becomes the story; the story is part of the work. That work-story is generational, inherited, and by extension, bequeathed as well. Because the young have their story as well.