|
Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
MOTHER
He recalls perfectly his earliest memories, the most powerful, formative ones. The boy is purely his mother’s influence, and uninfluenced by anything he could have learned in society, but now that he’s in his twenties and aching to sleep with a girl, a natural tendency pushes him farther and farther out of the nest. One night on his own, a drunk Do-joon follows a girl home from the bar. The next morning she is found murdered. Bong’s an accomplished and celebrated master of the structural elements that create humor, suspense, and pathos—he is among the best directors working today when it comes to understanding basic cinema language. One sequence in which the titular mother (Kim Hye-ja) attends the wake of her son’s alleged victim is a breathtaking nod to David Lynch-esque weirdness, while keeping us firmly rooted in the very real sadness of the situation. In another scene, she is found obtaining evidence in support of Do-joon’s innocence at his best friend Jin-tae’s cabin, and she is forced to hide and watch when Jin-tae (Jin Gu) arrives home for a romp with his young girlfriend. We’re transported from feeling intrigued to fearful, then suddenly appalled in a matter of minutes, a testament to Bong’s astounding chops as a director. Bong understands the underlying, formative structures of narrative cinema, but like Do-joon, his decisions don’t make a whole lot of sense in the everyday world. Enter at your own risk, and don’t be surprised when the characters don’t really jive. Half of the time these layered characters make unusual choices, as in Jin-tae’s macho sexist advances or a high-priced lawyer’s choice of venue (a karaoke bar) for an important meeting. Trust that there’s more going on here. Bong is a dark, cynical director, and wastes no opportunity to make this known. Kim Hye-ja is cast completely against type. Her active and sociopathic “mothering” here is anything but usual for this star of one of Korea’s longest-running television series, in which she patiently played the role of a loving, tolerant, and decidedly non-obsessive mother. Here, tirelessly crusading for her son’s innocence, the sinister plot she uncovers is anything but dinner table conversation, ranging from underage prostitution to chauvinistic cronyism within the realms of law enforcement and legal representation. Mother’s
audacious final 10 minutes are the darkest of all, and are as good a 10
minutes as any this year. Not only does this frustratingly irregular
plot finally resolve, but Bong makes his most shocking judgment yet.
Mother may be no match for the establishment, but her obsessive
diligence will not go unrewarded. One is reminded of another mother’s
resolve in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and wonders whether Norman
Bates’s eternal words hold as true: “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”
Michael Lee
|
Every bit his mother’s son, Do-joon
(Won Bin) is a creation of her obsessive doting, her pessimism, and her
selfish manipulations of his developmentally-delayed mind. His condition
is a strange one: he has no middle-term memory. Do-Joon may understand
what’s happening around him, but he has trouble remembering anything
earlier than that. Yet he knows well the basic teachings of his mother,
never forgetting any maxim she’s ever told him, most importantly, “Don’t
let anyone call you a retard.”