Bong Joon-ho and South Korean films have received unprecedented attention as "Parasite" won four awards at the latest Oscars. It is said that even the sales of Korean beer and instant noodles have also risen, which has set off a new "Korean wave" trend among movie fans around the world. In the words of Mr. Dai Jinhua, such success is related to the overall pattern and historical process of Korean films, and is the result of Korean films seeking benevolence.
In my personal opinion, "Parasite" is not the best Korean movie, or even the best movie Bong Joon-ho himself has directed. Among Feng Junhao's works, the best is "Memories of Murder"! Second, is the 2009 movie "Mother". "Parasite" can be ranked third. Although it is directed at the problems of class, wealth and poverty in South Korea, this work is still unable to compare with "Mother" in terms of emotional depth. In other words, "Mother" and "Parasite" have their own emphasis, but in terms of completion and overall thickness, I believe that "Mother" is a better work.
The story of "Mother" is not complicated. Keiko, a single mother, and Yin Taiyu, an adult son with slightly lower intelligence, depend on each other for life. The mother has close attention and care to her son.
Because of his intelligence, the son is innocent and has a poor memory on the one hand, and on the other hand, he is indifferent between right and wrong. He feels that through violence, he can be recognized and respected by others. This idea came from his mother and his good friend Zhentae respectively.
The mother was afraid that her son would be bullied, and taught him, "If someone scolds you, you hit him, and if he hits you once, you hit him twice." His good friend Zhentae retired from the army and has excellent physical fitness. A lot of experience. As can be seen from the movie, the two are regulars at the police station.
But the son's role is complicated by the fact that, despite his slightly lower intelligence, his belief in violence, and his sexually conscious age, he has a desire for women. This also became the origin of this tragic story.
One time, his son Taiyu asked his friend Zhentai for a drink, but Zhentai was late. Taiyu, who was drunk, went home alone, and met Wen Yazhong, a girl who was walking alone on the way. Tai Yu stepped forward to chat with Jiu Jin, but was scared away by the thrown stone and went home to sleep.
Unexpectedly, after waking up one night, Taiyu was arrested by the police and identified as the murderer. The victim, Wen Yazhong, died on a high balcony in the town. Since then, the mother has embarked on the road of avenging her son.
One of the interesting things about this movie is that all the male characters seem to be dwarfed . For example, the male police officer only recognizes the evidence in front of him and wants to close the case as soon as possible; the male lawyer who invites does not really want to help the pair. Mother and son; as for Taiyu's friend Zhentai, who only recognizes money but not people, is fierce and greedy; and most of the other men who appear also show some "sickness"...
From beginning to end, not a single man stood up to seek justice for his son Yin Taiyu. Well, this matter can only be done by the mother, who believes in her son 100%, will not kill, and will not do terrible things. Driven by this belief, the mother began to investigate alone, trying to find out the real culprit and overturn the case for her son. Suspecting that it was her son's friend Zhentae, she sneaked into his home to find evidence, but was denied by the police in the end; under Zhentae's reminder, she began to investigate the people around the deceased Wen Yazhong, and found that Wen Yazhong was not an ordinary high school girl. In order to support her grandmother, the girl interacted and had sex with different men, and had pictures of these men on her phone, and had frequent nosebleeds (probably sick). Compared with her son Yin Taiyu, the girl itself has a kind of complexity.
As the investigation deepened, the mother identified the suspect as an old scavenger who lived alone, but during the chat, the old man told her that he had witnessed Yin Taiyu kill the girl that night. The mother's belief was broken, she fell into madness, and killed the old man in the frenzy...
But the story is not over yet, the son was released from prison by accident, because the police found the girl's blood on the body of a Japanese Xihaner, and he insisted that he and the girl were boyfriend and girlfriend, and the blood was in Having sex with her was too intense to stay.
The entire film, which originated from an uncomplicated story, leads to a complex text. In the movie, when all men are in a situation where they cannot rely on, the mother shows her tenacity and strength. Even if she is not rich, she still maintains a kind of delicacy , as can be seen from many details, such as acupuncture boxes with patterns, applying lipstick, etc.; even if her son is regarded as a criminal, even if she feels that she and her son have been treated unfairly, she He still maintains a great sense of morality , which is reflected in going to Wen Yazhong's house to offer condolences, taking the old man's broken umbrella and paying for it. In addition, for the sake of her son, she, an ordinary woman, can sneak in, stalk, investigate, use money and violence like a high-IQ detective. Throughout the process, the mother's image becomes plump, three-dimensional, and awe-inspiring.
Based on the unconditional trust in the son, we glimpse the greatness and purity of mother's love. But maternal love cannot solve the real dilemma.
And the biggest dilemma is that she shrugs off the cocoon and gets closer to the truth step by step, and the truth is that her son is really the murderer that others say. As a result, maternal love instantly rose to an extreme, and the mother killed people and set fire to destroy the corpses. The greatness of a mother's love has turned into a terrible one!
Why is there such a situation? Why did this calm, tenacious, wise and moral mother fall into this madness? Is it just because he knew the fact that his son killed him?
In fact, there are two sides to this story. The A side is a single mother who embarks on the road of turning over the verdict for an adult son, which can be regarded as a suspenseful story. After the A side, there is a deep B side. The B side of the story is: In a deformed space, a mother and son have completed a long-standing emotional catharsis of the suppressed life by killing.
How to understand this deformed space? A small town in South Korea. Facing the dead girl, the local police seemed to be watching some kind of performance. When they encountered a little evidence, they tried to arrest people immediately and close the case, and lawyers could not rely on them. The entire local judicial system was extremely corrupt.
Before Taiyu was imprisoned, his friend Zhentai asked him to be a scapegoat. After Taiyu was imprisoned, his friend never went to see him, and even asked Taiyu's mother for money; the dead girl Wen Yazhong supported her grandma through assisted dating, which is enough to show that she was innocent during her lifetime. She was in a state of being taken care of, but after her death, many people appeared to mourn for her. It can be seen from this that in the small town, friendship and human feelings show a kind of falsehood and hypocrisy.
What's even more chilling is that Wen Yazhong, a high school girl, wandered among different men at a young age and became the "prey" of men. Even though she had passed away, when the boys in the same school talked about her, she was still the same. Laughing, lewd ugly faces.
Why does the mother tell her son that "if someone scolds you, you hit him"? We can fully imagine how his son was treated by others because of his low intelligence in the process of growing up! When the mother asked her son to recall the night of the crime, the son actually remembered that his mother gave him pesticides to kill him when he was five years old. Once again, we can imagine the hopelessness and helplessness this mother experienced while raising her son.
Corrupted judiciary, lack of morality, indifference and discrimination, the mother and son have lived in such an environment for a long time. The director Feng Junhao took his mother as the lead to show the details of the town and the spiritual outlook of the people one by one. There is no doubt that this is a deformed, sick living space.
They were repressed in this space day after day, until the son killed someone, tragedy happened, until the mother also killed someone, and the suppressed emotions were finally released in an extreme way. Looking at Feng Junhao's works, it is not difficult to find that the more specific the environment and space in which a story takes place, the better the quality of the final film will be. The environment has a deep understanding, and he fills the film with the details he excavated.
The movie "Mother" still has the shadow of "Memories of Murder", a small town, a murder case, the murderer is undetermined, looking for the murderer. And I personally tend to think that the murder in "Mother" is still an open-ended paragraph, similar to "Memories of Murder".
Although there is a clear ending from the mouth of the old scavenger-that the son killed the girl by mistake, from the perspective of light and shadow performance, it does not prevent us from conjecturing other possibilities. For example, is there a possibility that the girl committed suicide with the help of the old scavenger? The girl was terminally ill and showed world-weary tendencies, so she turned to the old scavenger for help and committed suicide. After the old scavenger killed her, she was afraid that she would be punished by law, so she blamed Yin Taiyu for the incident.
And why is the corpse hanging up high? It may be understood that the girl herself sued the sick town with her own death, and she wanted to be seen. In the end, the murderer was identified by the police as a Japanese Xihaner, and the son was released. The mother broke down and cried when she visited this Xihan'er. This is another release of the mother's emotions. Her cry was complicated. She felt pain for her son's murder, sorry for Xihan'er being imprisoned, and also sympathized with him, he is just as mentally poor as her son, but his condition is worse, not only is his intelligence worse, but he has not run for him Reversed parents. In this way, we can understand why she would cry like that in front of strangers.
In the movie, the mother has a special skill, acupuncture. Her classic line is, "There is an acupuncture point that can unravel the pimples in your heart, and at the same time clear the terrible memory in your heart." This is her skill, experience and self-comfort . .
When the son used the acupuncture box to awaken his mother's memory of murder again, she sat on the tour bus, secretly used needles to do acupuncture for herself, and then followed the crowd and danced in the sunset bus.
I guess she has comforted herself like this many times in her life.
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