Bong Joon Ho's "Mother" — Lockdown Round 2 — Bad Getaway
Who's gonna spatchcock their bird this year?
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Now Showing: Mother (2009)
American audiences most likely became aware of South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho when his tour-de-force thriller Parasite won Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars. However, over the preceding two decades, Bong had established himself as one of the most creative and provocative contemporary directors. His first major hit was 2006’s The Host, about a monster that hunts people in Seoul’s rivers and sewers and the family of an addled snack stand attendant who hunt it down. While The Host had a sort of gonzo horror feel, his subsequent film, Mother, provides the first true inkling of Bong’s peculiar genius for storytelling.
As in Parasite and The Host, the story in Mother is driven by characters on the margins of society—poor, with muddled histories, acting in ways that are always slightly lawless but morally ambiguous. Mental and ethical deficiencies are papered over to appear, at least at first, as nothing more than harmless flaws. The oddities of the characters are established quickly and without doubt. There’s never a question of the capacities of the characters. Yet the plot unspools slowly and deliberately, following a labyrinthine yet inevitable path. To say that Bong’s films—including Mother—depend on a twist at the end is inaccurate, in that a plot twist implies a sort of sleight of hand or duping of the audience. Rather, the unexpected turns in his films feel like the only logical outcomes for the characters in question. The narrative is fitted to the needs of the characters, rather than the other way around. Whereas a movie such as the The Sixth Sense, famous for a surprise at the end, is rendered almost unwatchable once you know how it ends, Bong’s movies gain an entirely new, richer and deeper flavor whenever they are revisited.
Mother opens with a haunting scene of a late middle-aged woman, clearly a mother (Hye-Ja Kim), alone in a rural field, dancing to an unfamiliar beat. After a moment, the film cuts away and we see her once more, preparing herbs in a shop while her adult son, Yoon Do-Joon (Won Bin), plays with a dog in the street. Just as suddenly, Do-Joon—who the audience quickly realizes is a person with an intellectual disability—is hit by a car, and the action begins to unspool. While Do-Joon in uninjured and remains a central character, the protagonist is the mother. A brutal murder soon occurs in the impoverished neighborhood and the police pin it on Do-Joon, an easy patsy. The rest of the film is essentially a detective story, with his mother attempting to prove his innocence. The clues she uncovers, however, say as much about the hidden history of a mother and her son as they do about the murder of a schoolgirl.
That opening shot, of the mother dancing in the field, comes back later, frame-for-frame, but freighted with an entirely new meaning the second time around. Bong forces the characters and the audience to constantly reevaluate and recontextualize what they have seen in light of both new evidence about events and new insights about the motivations and desires of people with hidden pasts. In Mother, he delivers something unusual: A story that is simultaneously far more complicated than it seems at first glance and also entirely accessible every step of the way. There’s never a moment of confusion about what is happening, rather, there is a constant sense that there’s more to uncover, just below the surface.
Mother manages to be both dark—and deeply troubling—and yet also oddly uplifting. There is evil in its world, but also a capacity for, if not full recovery, at least a process by which people forget the horrible events of the past. It’s about present injustices, past tragedies and the unique ability of time to heal those wounds. It’s also wickedly, darkly funny places, deeply empathetic towards its characters, and visually and aurally stunning. It is less of a puzzle box than Parasite, but in many ways its characters and their struggles are more memorable. It’s a film about passion, crime and love, in all its sick and twisted forms, yet its intrigues grab the audience’s attention and never let go.
Mother is currently streaming on Criterion.
Last Chance for a Haircut
Well. We all knew it was coming. A second lockdown seems imminent. Schools in New York City have closed, and it’s probably a matter of days (maybe a couple of weeks) before non-essential businesses go the same way. Naturally, because this is New York, there’s some confusion on when this will happen. The mayor’s office says it already has, but the state uses different numbers and Cuomo says we’re still good to go. So get that haircut while you still can!
Reading List:
While the focus is on the outgoing Trump administration’s shambling exit and whiny attempts to subvert the election, the handful of Democratic Congresspeople who won in red districts are girding for internecine war come January. Rep. Elissa Slotkin has shares some thoughts over at Politico on how the party can get through it.
Some joker ran a $35 million Ponzi scheme and when the FBI finally caught up to him, he fled in his pickup truck, stopped at a lake and… puttered around with an underwater scooter for a few hours until they picked him up anyway. It’s a terrible escape plan. It’s slow. It leaves bubbles. And it’s a lake. It’s not like you’re getting anywhere they can’t reach you. (Hat tip to reader Ali Smith for finding the story.)
It’s Thanksgiving next week, and while big family gatherings are off the table, we can still eat turkey. Following Mark Bittman’s lead this summer, I started experimenting with spatchcocking chickens, and perhaps it’s time for me to go big or go home, so to speak. Spatchcocking, which involves splitting the spine of the bird, allows the chef to lay it flat and cook it more evenly, and turkey, a notoriously dry variety of poultry, may benefit in particular from this approach.