A Mother, Murder, and Memories

In a pivotal moment in Korean filmmaker Joon-ho Bong’s recent film, the superb Madeo (2009), a police officer, while referring to the forensic team collecting evidence at a murder scene, tells his colleague “Cops these days…CSI and all that TV!”

While serials like the aforementioned CSI and its various spin-offs focus on the science behind solving terrible crimes, it is films like Madeo (Mother) that, in contrast, have at their heart the dynamics of the individuals involved therein—the victim, the accused, and their friends and family.

The eponymous Mother (she is not mentioned by her name throughout the film’s 128-minute duration), played impeccably by Hye-ja Kim, lives a forlorn life in a town in the outskirts of Seoul with her intellectually challenged son Yoon Do-joon. She tries to make both ends meet by selling herbs and medicines and by providing acupuncture sessions to the neighbours, though she does not have a valid licence to ply that particular trade.

Mother treats Do-joon as a child, helping him eat, asking him to tuck in his shirt, and advising him not to mix with his friend Jin-tae, who she considers as ‘bad seed’. Knowing that they have ‘only got each other’, she shares an exceptionally strong bond with her son, who besides lacking in intellectual capacity also has problems remembering things. A harmless and gullible guy, who is as innocent of the nitty-gritty of life as he is of the man-woman equation, the only time Do-joon reacts violently is when anyone calls him a ‘retard’.

The occasional visit to the neighbourhood police station—where the guards and the higher officials are all known to Mother from their childhood—when her son gets involved in minor scuffles, takes a turn for the worst when Do-joon is taken into custody by officer Je-mun as the prime suspect in the murder of a young girl Moon Ah-jung. Knowing fully well that her son cannot ‘even harm a water-bug’, Mother starts running from pillar to post—trying to bribe Je-mun with camphor ginseng (‘which helped you when you were a child’) and getting hold of the most well-known public defender of the area, the karaoke-loving Gong Suk-ho, to prove her son’s innocence. But when she finds herself shunned by the police, who have an incriminating piece of evidence at their disposal that links Do-joon directly to the crime; and betrayed by the lawyer, who suggests sending Do-joon away to a mental asylum for four years, Mother takes it upon herself to acquit her son. She starts collecting evidence, distributing pamphlets proclaiming her son’s innocence, and starts talking to kids who knew Moon Ah-jung, who, she finds during her investigations was quite opposite to her own son—being a girl who grew up far beyond her chronological age. In her quest, she finds two allies—a neigbour who runs a photo studio and Jin-tae, Do-joon’s friend.

Her efforts at trying to make Do-joon remember the incidents of the fateful night face a curious resistance. In trying to remember, Do-joon inadvertently unlocks various suppressed memories that rather than helping mother find a ray of hope, makes her come face to face with incidents in her and Do-joon’s lives that she never thought he would recollect.

In the same manner, as Mother proceeds in her search for truth, dark secrets of the small town—a town that had not seen a murder in years—start rising to the surface, till we reach a dénouement that throws both Mother and we, the viewer, off-balance.

Joon-ho Bong, alongside Chan-wook Park (of Oldboy and Thirst fame), belongs to an exciting generation of Korean directors, who have ushered in a new era of filmmaking. Bong made quite a splash in Hollywood with his 2006 creature feature Gwoemul (The Host). However, the film with which one can draw parallels with his most-recent work is his film of 2003, Salinui chueok (Memories of murder). In that film, two police officers, one from a small town and the other from the city try to solve a series of grisly killings in the South Korean province of Gyunggi. In both the films, the peace and quite of a small town are ruptured by violent crime. In both cases, a mentally-challenged individual is accused of the misdeed. In both instances, though the cases were apparently solved, one character was found to be carrying the burden of truth for the rest of their lives.

In the course of Madeo, Mother asserts twice that she, and only she, knows of an acupuncture technique that when applied to ‘the meridian point’ can ‘loosen the knots in the heart and clear all horrible memories from the mind’. In the climax of the film, which harks back to the conclusion of Oldboy, Mother found out that the same acupuncture needles that she claims can have such a therapeutic effect, can also be the harbinger of unimaginable pain.