Following his crowd-pleasing, box office record-breaking monster movie “The Host,” which premiered at Cannes in 2006 as a Midnight Screening, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho returns to the genre of his second feature film, the “Zodiac”-esque mystery thriller “Memories of Murder.” The director’s latest Cannes entry (premiering in Un Certain Regard) is another procedural, this time concerning a widow’s attempt to clear the name of her mentally handicapped, 28-year-old son, who is accused of brutally murdering a young woman.
All of Bong’s films (even the director’s loopy rom-com debut, “Barking Dogs Never Bite”) are notable for their riotous entertainment and their equally pointed socio-political commentaries, and while “Mother” certainly brings the entertainment (like Bong’s other films, it’s brisk and breathlessly suspenseful, with twists manifesting at all the right moments to sustain the tension) it doesn’t seem to be pushing any broad message or moral. Instead, the picture’s primary theme is one of maternal devotion: As the title suggests, this is a film about a mother, one whose role as such takes precedence over anything else.
“Mother” sometimes recalls Akira Kurosawa’s early noir “Stray Dog,” as it surveys a small town rote with secrets and latches on to the desperate, human struggle of its inexperienced detective. Our gumshoe is the titular mother, Hye-ja, played startlingly by middle-aged actress Kim Hye-ja, whose facial contours and wide, sad eyes communicate her character’s exasperation. It’s a performance that channels the ferocious femmes of Pedro Almodovar’s best films with fervent, melodramatic intensity.
Another South Korean genre film at Cannes this year, Park Chan-Wook’s noxious vampire thriller “Thirst” (which is infuriatingly in the competition section at this festival), dumps heaps of self-serious exposition in effort to explain the motivations of its protagonist. Bong, too smart and skilled a craftsman to waste a second, opens “Mother” with a surrealist sequence (the first of two bookending passages) which tells us all we need to know about his fickle heroine– her strength, grace and even her loneliness– absent the heavy-handed lecturing of Park’s film.
From here, “Mother” immediately kicks into high gear, leading into a hit-and-run incident which sends characters scurrying about their small, rural town and sows the seeds of a hard-boiled procedural.
Do-joon (Korean television star Won Bin), Hye-ja’s mentally handicapped son, is hit by a passing Mercedes Benz and convinced by his headstrong friend to take revenge. The two track the automobile to a golf course, where they think they’ve found the culprits (a group of unsuspecting yuppies), and then proceed to bash their faces in. This understandably earns the attention of the police, and when a later crime is committed (the death of a promiscuous schoolgirl), Do-Joon, who was even seen at the scene of the crime, is convicted and jailed.
Convinced of her son’s innocence and angered by law enforcement’s unsympathetic response to his condition, Hye-ja turns to a pricey lawyer and a friend on the force for help. But when no one seems to give a damn about her and Do-joon, all it takes is some bold advice to make Hye-ja take matters into her own hands: “Don’t trust anyone…you go out and find the real killer yourself.” Bong’s film then quietly segues into the realm of a vigilante picture, akin to Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” (a Cannes official selection last year) but with much more narrative focus and a decidedly sharper characterization of its distressed parent.
“Mother” sits well alongside Bong’s other films and acts as a sort of compromise between the absurdist fantasy elements of “The Host” and the more plot-driven social-realism of “Memories of Murder.” It’s not this talented Korean auteur’s best film to date, but it does help solidify his status as one of the most gifted directors of his generation (even with only 4 films to his credit). Bong looks to the age-old genre of the film noir for inspiration, but unlike so many filmmakers who obsessively recreate the look and tone of the noir, Bong instead applies his own thoroughly modern aesthetic, but taps in to the same moral gravity which invested Kurosawa’s most effective genre films (“Stray Dog,” and also one of our favorites of the Japanese master’s works, “High and Low”).
Bong’s “Mother” isn’t flawless (it’s probably a few scenes too long, with one too many plot twists piling-up towards the end), and its depiction of the mentally handicapped (or, rather, Won Bin’s bug-eyed and cartoonish, one note rendering of his imbecilic character) takes away from the resonance of the film’s central relationship. Still, as always, Bong’s filmmaking skill is totally on point; his sweeping camera movements and evocative colorization complement the overall seething atmosphere of this often Hitchcockian thriller. And one scene, in which a major revelation takes place as a character stumbles backwards out of the frame, punctuated by a goosebump-inducing scream, is actually worthy of the overused Hitchcock comparison.
In any case, especially compared to the other films we’ve seen at Cannes ’09 — again feeling like a weak year so far — “Mother” probably should have been accepted into the official competition selection. [B+] – Sam C. Mac