The Mother
Mother
.
~A touching and a powerful film as portrayed by Duncan Mitchel~
Bong Joon-ho’s new film Mother begins with a tease: Do-joon’s Mother (Kim Hye-ja, Palace), in an embroidered violet jacket, walks toward the camera through a field of tall grass. Soft jazz-funk begins to play on the soundtrack. Gazing offscreen, she stops walking, then hesitantly starts dancing to the music. We’ll see her in the same field later in the movie, but not dancing.
.
.
Do-joon’s Mother lives with her son Do-joon (Won Bin, Taegugk, Guns and Talks) behind the murky shop where she sells medicinal plants and roots, and practices acupuncture without a license on the side. Do-joon is very good looking (he’s played by Won Bin, after all), but he’s not quite right in the head, rather like Song Gang-ho’s character Gang-du in The Host, and like Gang-du, there is a hint that his impairment is his mother’s fault. He’s not retarded, but his dullness is difficult to define: he has no attention span to speak of and a poor memory; at twenty-seven he still sleeps with his mom, with a hand on her breast. He hangs around with Jin-tae (Jin Ku, A Dirty Carnival), who’s also good-looking in a bad-boy way, and is a bad boy – a tough, cynical hustler who feels constrained by his small-town life and dreams of adventure. Still, Jin-tae seems to have nothing better to do than hang out with Do-joon. He taunts Do-joon for being a virgin at his age. Jin-tae doesn’t seem to have any family, and lives alone at the edge of town. There’s a lot of this in Mother: one high school character lives with her half-senile, boozing grandmother, intact families are not much in evidence. (For a “traditional” society like Korea, its films and TV dramas feature a surprising number of one-parent families and broken homes.)
.
.
Do-joon and Jin-tae are already in trouble with the police for vandalizing a Mercedes-Benz that knocked Do-joon down in the street. Then a high-school girl is murdered, and a clue connected to Do-joon is found near her body. Relieved that their first murder case in living memory is so cut-and dried, the police pack Do-joon away. He insists that he didn’t kill the girl, though he saw her the night she died. Frantic, his mother sets out to prove Do-joon’s innocence. Her blundering efforts draw Jin-tae into helping her to play detective, and they poke around the seamy underside of the town. Jin-tae enjoys himself: “This is in my blood!” he exults after beating up a couple of “suspects,” “I should have been a cop.” In jail, Do-joon tries to dredge up details from the sieve of his memory, often coming up with details that make matters worse, while his mother closes in on the girl’s real killer … or maybe not … before returning to that grassy field.
Kim Hye-ja is famous for playing mothers on Korean TV, and it must have been interesting for her to play such a double-edged role. Taking the melodramatic archetype of the Mother to extremes, Kim plays a mother whose symbiosis with her son is nearly complete, yet Bong and Kim manage to keep the character from being monstrous. (The archetype isn’t just Korean: the mother who sacrifices everything to save her accused son is a mainstay of American country music, for example.) She does a great job, and one of the main pleasures of the movie is watching her. Won Bin’s Do-joon seems like a change from his usual pretty-boy roles, but since the people around Do-joon comment ruefully on his good looks (another of Bong’s jokes, I suspect), it’s not that big a leap. Jin Ku plays Jin-tae energetically, full of frustrated vitality, and by the end turns out to be a bit more sympathetic than you’d expect.
.
.
If you’ve seen Bong Joon-ho’s earlier movies, you’ll have some idea what to expect from Mother. Bong says that he chose the English word mother as his title to avoid the associations of the Korean word omoni, but it’s probably no coincidence that the Korean pronunciation of mother also sounds like the Korean pronunciation of murder. He likes to build his stories around ordinary people; the characters of his first feature Barking Dogs Never Bite — a college professor and his salarywoman wife — were as upscale as he gets. Since then his protagonists have been small-town cops (Memories of Murder), a family that runs a food stand by the Han River (The Host), and now a small-town widow. His manner is operatic: reactions, facial expressions, sound design, even the weather (see the use of rain in Mother) tend to be over the top. Even Won Bin’s stupefied look is rapturous in its dullness. Typically for Bong, there are plenty of small jokes at the expense of movie clich?s – misrecognitions, comically inappropriate reactions – jokes that make you wince as you laugh.
.
.
In this and in his operatic excesses, Bong is reminiscent of Pedro Almodovar – think of All About My Mother – and if you like Almodovar you may like Bong. (Come to think of it, Lee Byeong-woo’s music reminds me of the music in Almodovar’s films.) Hong Gyeong-pyo’s photography captures the grittiness of decrepit small towns and the working poor; there’s a lot of grey and murk, and even the blood looks dark and muddy. Mother is a retreat in scale after the CGI-heavy science-fiction blockbuster The Host, but an advance in confidence and style. It even contains his first sex scene! It’s been obvious since Memories of Murder that Bong is a director worth watching, and Mother confirms it.
(Duncan Mitchel)-koreanfilm.org
I am amazed at the trailer – now lets see how this film will favor during Cannes:)
oh he got out of national service ? WOW!
hehe
Here is something to think about:
It was then kids are portrayed as ghosts or evil things
~get this~
NOW MOTHERS!
i mean its a step into it ^ ^
