Unwritten
Codes
by
Howard Schumann
After a night of drinking, Do Joon (Bin Won), an intellectually-challenged
young man, encouraged by his reckless buddy Jin-tae (Ku-jin), attempts
to pick up a young high school girl walking home alone. Shockingly,
the next day Do Joon is arrested for the girl’s murder as his
mother looks on helplessly. Seen at the Vancouver Film Festival, Bong
Joon-ho’s Mother is an intelligent,
suspenseful, and darkly comic revelation of the lengths to which an
overbearing but deeply loving mother will go to pursue justice for her
son who, she believes, has been wrongly convicted of murder.
In a small Korean
town, the elderly mother, played by Korean TV star Kim Hye-ja in one
of the most nuanced and emotive performances of the year, makes a living
by selling herbal medicine and providing illegal acupuncture treatments.
Convinced of her son’s innocence, she will stop at nothing, even
violence, to find the real killer. She learns details about the dead
girl’s personal life and talks to alternative suspects, even though
even she is not fully prepared for the twists and turns that her investigation
will take.
Though there
is an evocative score by Lee Byeong-woo, the film’s use of ambient
sounds such as the slashing of Hye-ja’s herb chopper and the rustling
of leaves add to an ominous mood, though it often clashes with the absurdist
events seen on screen. The film opens with a shot of a lone elderly
woman walking in a vast expanse of open field, reminiscent of the opening
shot in Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou Chou. As she
approaches the camera, the background music becomes rhythmic and the
woman begins a strange, almost provocative dance. The scene then shifts
to her business, where she is keeping a close eye on her 27-year-old
son Do-Joon, who she feels needs her constant protection. Playing in
the street with a dog, the boy is knocked over by a speeding hit and
run driver in a Mercedes-Benz.
Uninjured, Do-Joon
and Jin-tae chase the car to a golf course where the two attack the
drivers of the Benz with sticks while collecting numerous golf balls,
later to be used in evidence in court. On the fateful night, after Do-Joon
is thrown out of a bar for being drunk, he pursues the high school girl
home and the next day is arrested for murder, although details of what
happened are murky. Bong shows the police procedural, as in his Memories
of Murder from 2003, to be on the lackadaisical side, and conveys
the impression that everyone involved is only out for their self-interest,
including police, lawyers, friends, junk dealers, and schoolgirls.
Reminiscent
of Alfred Hitchcock's quirkier and more offbeat films, Mother
is an intense, witty, and engaging psychological thriller with enigmatic
characters that do not just populate the screen but are vitally alive.
In one outstanding scene that will etch itself forever in your memory,
Hye-ja attends the funeral of the girl her son is alleged to have murdered.
Although besieged by distraught family members who think her son is
a murderer, she has the fortitude to look them in the eye and proclaim
“my son could never do something like that.” Although “barking
dogs don’t bite,” this woman is one “mutha”
of an exception.
*
Like Bruno Dumont’s
epic police procedural L’Humanité, Police,
Adjective is a poem of mood, silence, and soul. Winner
of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival,
and shown at this year's Vancouver Film Festival, the second feature
by Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu is a follow-up to his black
comedy 12:08 East of Bucharest, which won the Camera D’Or
at Cannes in 2006. Police, Adjective is about a taciturn, plain-clothed
police officer who has developed a conscience over making an arrest,
an unusual occurrence in the bureaucratic, post-Communist society of
Romania, where the law is rigidly enforced regardless of its logic.
Like Phaaron of L’Humanité, Cristi (Dragos Bucur)
is an unlikely cop, an unglamorous member of the working class who wears
the same pullover sweater four days in a row and goes about his job
in a mechanical and emotionally unexpressive manner.
Police,
Adjective is set in the director’s hometown of Vaslui in
northeastern Romania, a venue that looks unbearably bleak. The general
atmosphere is one of decay, with paint inside the houses peeling and
chipped, lockers rusted, mailboxes broken, and computers looking like
Model Ts. There are no camera tricks here, only long takes delivered
from a horizontal pan, cinematography that deliberately enhances the
tedium. Porumboiu devotes long stretches of the film watching Cristi
simply going about his routine. On orders from his superior, Nelu (Ion
Stoica), he follows Alex (Alexandru Sabadac), a teenager at the local
high school who is suspected of buying hash and selling it to his fellow
students, shadowing the boy daily from home to school in hopes of finding
out the source of the drugs.
In the course
of his investigation, however, Cristi realizes that Alex is just a kid
who occasionally smokes pot with some of his pals and is not a threat
to society. Taking detailed notes, Cristi avoids meeting with his boss,
waiting to find out the source of the hash before making a move, knowing
that arresting a sixteen year old boy for smoking will mean a prison
term of at least three years and possibly seven. Finally, when he is
ordered to make a full report and take action, Cristi refuses to follow
orders from the Police Captain, citing his conscience and the fact that
the law will soon be repealed. Like Phaaron of L’Humanité,
Cristi is willing to remain faithful to what he believes in, but his
feelings are ignored by those in a position of power.
In
a memorable sequence, Cristi’s boss, Captain Anghelache (Vlad
Ivanov) brings in a dictionary and asks him to look up the meaning of
the words "conscience,” "law,” “moral,”
and “police,” attempting to show him that as a police officer
he must obey the letter of the law, not impose his own morality on the
situation. The scene is cold, efficient, and persuasive, but it is obvious
that the law Cristi is asked to follow is based more on semantics than
on morality. While most of the first half of the film is filled with
uneventful surveillance, a scene at home between Cristi and his wife
Anca (Irina Saulescu) adds some humor to the dour proceedings. Husband
and wife discuss the meaning of the lyrics of a popular song that Anca
is playing over and over again, Cristi giving the words a literal meaning
which make little sense, while his wife ascribes to them their proper
symbolic and poetic meaning.
Police, Adjective provides a welcome dose of conscience to
a genre that has been buried in technology and filled with violence,
car chases, and ugliness, a genre that has dealt only with methods and
not consequences. While the film is austere and requires a great deal
of patience, with little dialogue and no musical score, Porumboiu forces
us to relate to the characters by observing their eyes, their physical
movements, and their facial expressions. He expects us not only to see
but to think about what we are seeing and, in the process, to bring
us face to face with what makes us truly human.
©2009 Howard Schumann
CineScene
