Of Teens and Men

The hot-blooded youths of "Remember Me" and "The Exploding Girl" versus the "Mother" that loves them.

But youth, it seems, is not only wasted on the young. At the center of Bong Joon-ho’s “Mother” lives the sort of older woman who hovers nervously at most films’ peripheries. When Do-joon, a mentally challenged young man, is accused of murder, his apothecary owner mother sets out to absolve him, since he himself cannot remember the events of the night in question. That’s the bare bones but, of course, nothing is that simple.

In its first shot, Mother (she looms too large as an archetype to be anchored by a specific name) hikes though a field of dead grasses, and then, clad in demure clothing and an expressionless calm, erupts into a dance — just the kind of maniacal whimsy anyone who’s seen this director’s “The Host” has come to expect. In this case the whimsy telegraphs an actual philosophy — a warning right from the start of this remarkable meditation that we never know our parents’ true natures, despite or perhaps because of how devoted they seem to us.

Another early scene sets up just how pathologically attentive Mother is. While her son pisses against a wall, she edges over and peers down intently. You don’t get the sense that her curiosity is prurient so much as proprietal. She produced him and so by the transitive property she also produced this urine.

For a time, this film masquerades as a murder mystery, but as no one is painted as trustworthy the suspense hangs by a tiny thread. It is Mother’s complexities that captivate: She flits about her son and even flirts, conniving for him while she stamps her foot coyly; frets over him while she feeds him from her plate, and even sleeps in the same bed where he reaches for her breast drunkenly in an odd, Freudian burlesque. What else is she capable of? we learn to wonder. To what degree does she grasp her doe-eyed son’s limitations? And how much anger lurks beneath that terrific fidelity?

At one point, while trailing a possible suspect, she spies on her son’s friend’s sexual interlude through the keyhole of a closet. At first she watches, then she averts her eyes only to returns her gaze hungrily. We all love, Bong suggests, but so much of that love is borne of a bald, bloodthirsty desire for connection. This woman may cluck and bustle in every shot with the love she carries for her son, but it is to the credit of this fierce, seemingly slight film that we come to accept that a purity of intent differs profoundly from any innocence we may project.

Lisa Rosman is our guest critic for the month of March.

“Remember Me” opens wide on March 12th; “The Exploding Girl” opens in New York March 12th, with other markets to follow; “Mother” opens in New York and Los Angeles on March 12th, with other markets to follow.

[Additional photos: "The Exploding Girl," Oscilloscope Pictures, 2009]

Pages: 1 2