Film Festival 09 - Mother
Mother
Madeo, South Korea 2009, 129m
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Festivals: Cannes (Un Certain Regard) 2009
In the hands of Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Memories of Murder), the
story of a mother's campaign to clear her good-for-nothing son of a
murder charge continually refuses to go where you think it must be
going. As she stands up to attorney incompetence and an over eager
police department and mounts her own investigation, Bong divulges
his Hitchcockian twists and turns and changes of tone with awesome
assurance. Actress Kim Hye-ja, one of the national treasures of
Korean TV, subverts her apparently lovable overbearing persona to
startling effect. - BG
"Bong starts out playing by the rules of a whodunit, but then bends
them when the solution of the mystery comes earlier than we expect,
setting up Mom's solution to the solution. As it becomes steadily
clearer that she'll stop at nothing to save her pride and joy,
Mother evolves into a deadpan variant on Psycho& The movie's
wit is terrifically dry, and I could swear there isn't one
misjudged shot or trite performance in it." - Tom Carson, GQ
"Bong Joon-ho, in South Korea, is making the movies Hollywood
should be making-formally precise and inventive, slyly engaging but
never overturning popular genres, directed with sincerity and
assurance, juggling tones with vitality, focused on the down and
out losers of the world, and telling their stories with a high
degree of sophistication and entertainment& Mother is clearly
dedicated to actress Kim Hye-ja and runs her down a remarkably
crazy path with a truly wondrous and strange finale at its end." -
Daniel Kasman, The Auteurs
"Mother confirms Bong's prodigious talent in bending any genre to
serve his own idiosyncratic vision." - Maggie Lee, Hollywood
Reporter
In Korean with English subtitles
