As proven by his serial-killer mystery Memories of Murder (2003) and box-office record-breaking monster flick The Host (2006), South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho is a director who is adept at knitting a high level of entertainment with socio-political commentary.
For his latest work, Mother, Bong returns to the crime-thriller genre to tell a cleverly crafted story about a widow’s attempt to clear the name of her mentally and emotionally handicapped son, who has been accused of murder.
Revolving around the commanding central performance by veteran television thespian Kim Hye-ja, the film tones down the director’s fondness for broad messages and zooms in on maternal love pushed to extremes. It is both a well-executed noir thriller and a disturbing portrait of motherhood.
The film opens with Hye-ja (Kim Hye-ja), a long-widowed mother, chopping herbs inside a dingy herbal shop she runs to make ends meet in a small town. All the while, she stays alert to what happens on the street where her mentally handicapped son Do-joon (played by the almost unrecognizable heartthrob Won Bin) plays with a dog.
Suddenly, a Mercedes Benz knocks her son over and speeds off. Unhurt, Do-joon and his foul-tempered friend Jin-tae (Jin Goo) pursue the automobile to a golf course, where the dim-witted Do-joon collects several golf balls before he and his friend get into a dustup with the well-to-do hit-and-runners.
The next day, one of Do-Joon’s golf balls is found next to a murdered high school girl. An easy target for the lazy police to extract a confession, the young man is quickly convicted and jailed.
Finding no help from either the cops or the lawyer, Hye-ja, convinced that her son is innocent, takes matters into her own hands and embarks on a crusade to find the real killer.
Once the investigation begins, Mother kicks into high gear, honing a polished murder mystery filled with unexpected turns and twists. Tensions escalate as the film spirals in flashbacks and revelations that divulge dark secrets harbored inside the rural community and yet refuse to entirely mold the audience’s knowledge of the killer’s identity. The mood-drenched cinema-tography helps to create an aura of disquiet and foreboding with a stark palette of gloomy blues and greens.
The true genius of Bong is shown in the director’s wedding genre conventions with his own idiosyncratic vision that, in the case of Mother, blends maternal devotion with a diabolical murder to create a disturbingly loving and vicious human portrait.
More surprisingly, Bong is able to tell the audience everything they need to know about his compelling heroine even before the real narrative sets in. In the pre-credit sequence, Hye-ja dances on a meadow to the imaginary music in her head. She is graceful and alone, her wide, vacant eyes exuding poignant emotions that haunt the audience long after the end credits roll.
Without a doubt, the film’s most mesmerizing aspect is watching Hye-ja, the indomitable matriarch gradually turn into an inhuman force. The familiar small-town setting is reminiscent of Bong’s Memories of Murder in its ability to capture the mindset of a rural community. In Mother, the village is populated by scoundrels, whores and idiots for whom Hollywood-style justice and moral naivete are truly a fairy tale.
In the last, flickering shot, a murderer joins a group on a party bus. The passengers sing and dance like fools, while the murderer seems at once the most lucid and the craziest of them all.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless