MOTHER
We all have mothers, some are obsessively focused on us, while others ignore, abuse and/or fail to protect us. My favorite Marxist, intellectual political academic, Slavoj Zizek would most likely find Freud/Lacan’s devouring maternal bird in the titular character here, as he did, albeit more metaphorically in Hitchcock’s trilogy of North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds. In this film by Korean director Bong Joon-ho, we are once again faced with the task of contemplating whether the mother whose love knows no limits is the best model for idealized womanhood.
In this particular situation, Mother (Kim Hye-la) in addition to being nameless, is a self-sacrificing and overly protective single mother of a 27 year old, developmentally disabled son, Do-joon (Won Bin.) One of the recurring motifs the director uses is Mother chopping herbs as she watches her son across the street, anticipating some danger for him as we anticipate that she will chop off a finger or even her own hand.
Do-joon hangs around with a seemingly witless, but not mentally deficient, band of guys who involve him in petty crime schemes, taxing the nerves of our poor heroine. But it is his appearance at the scene of a murder of a young teenage girl that pushes Mother’s protective capabilities to the limit. Convinced of his innocence she sets out on a journey to do what the inept police haven’t: uncover the actual sequence of events, which she does. Her response it, to say the least, surprising if not illogical from her point of view.
It’s an odd film, with an almost excruciatingly slow buildup. But pain is the point, it’s almost Brechtian. There is nothing really visually pleasurable, in a conventional sense about how the scenes are constructed, even the opening with Mother in a beautiful field of waving grass is off kilter, with her twisted face, her frumpy dress and her strange fuzzily permed hair. It’s alienating, yet it’s also a mystery/thriller, that inadvertently sucks you into problem solving. Somehow we find ourselves swept along with Mother, forced to take up her maniacal point of view as she puts the clues together.
In the end it’s all solved, tidied up as who-dun-its always are, yet we are not left feeling the least bit comforted. Conversely, it only confirms that feeling that, deep down, we are all still scared of our mothers.
Mother opens March 19. 2010.
Directed by BONG Joon-ho; story by BONG Joon-ho; screenplay by PARK Eun-kyo and BONG Joon-ho; produced by Miky Lee; cinematography by HONG Kyung-pyo; edited by MOON Sae-kyoung; music by LEE Byeong-woo. Released by Magnolia Pictures. Running time: 129 minutes.
With: KIM Hye-ja (Mother); WON Bin (YOON Do-joon); JIN Goo (Jin-tae); YOON Jae-moon (Je-mun); JUN Mi-sun (Mi-sun); SONG Sae-beauk (Sepaktakraw detective); and LEE Young-suck (Ragman.)
