Contemplations of a Culture-Shocked Movie-Goer

By Moze Halpernin

Those of you who live in Paris have likely noticed the frightening abundance of misery-stricken, wet, baffled, crushed, torn, tempest-tossed Korean widows plastering the Paris metro stations.  Lurking behind every endearingly Parisian puff of urine with that worn mien, waiting to shatter commuters’ iPoded complacency, silently bemoaning the woes, the burdens, the weight of motherhood.  Actually, said Korean widows are just one Korean widow, played by Hye-Ja Kim, star of acclaimed director Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother.  After feeling the emotional punch of the posters at least four times daily (or however many metro rides, transfers, etc. I took, multiplied by about 11, thanks to those overzealous French poster gluers), I couldn’t simply not see the movie; I wanted to know why this woman was so, so pitiful.  In that sense, I suppose I am a sucker for the matronly melancholy, prone to offering my heart up to any Kathy Bates or Bette Midler who sheds a tear on my screen. I therefore enlisted three friends to accompany me to the Odéon at St-Germain-des-Prés– one friend who barely speaks French, one who speaks decent French, and one who is French– entirely unaware of the fact that I either was or wasn’t about to catalyze a very telling or not-so-telling social experiment.   For, as an American, seeing a Korean movie subtitled in French takes a certain amount of energy, inventiveness, and willingness to admit to defeat.

The movie opens with a sweeping shot of Kim trudging through a wheat-field.  Anticipating a thoroughly despair-drenched film, I found myself so ready to submit to the lugubriousness of the lone-woman-in-wheat-field motif, for the camera (and me, vicariously) to swing down upon her weathered face, for it to rain on that ho-bag, to feel the instant gratification of sympathy for aforementioned ho-bag. Alas, no such catharsis was provided.  Rather, as the shot nears her face, she begins to flop around.  And the flopping turns to dancing– a little disco, a little twist– oh so supple.  And her frown transforms to a smile, then euphoria, then back to a frown.  This lady was not the dejected bitty from the posters- no, this lady had spunk. I felt betrayed, though quite contentedly so.  I had so impressionably trusted the poster, but now I was getting something so much better.  A soggy perm, wheat, and the sexualized elderly.  I was laughing hysterically. I laughed throughout the film regardless of the progressively perverse plot.  Director Bong Joon-Ho makes many an ironic attempt at detachment- shooting from the point of view of a plate of shellfish and incorporating assumedly inaccessible topics (incest? infanticide?  shellfish testimonies?) to deny the audience the right to seek sanctuary or familiarity in this woman’s misfortune. I was laughing with the film, not at it, I thought.  I was doing exactly what Joon-Ho was asking.  

 For, really, all one can do is laugh and maybe weed through the tawdry plot for intention, but probably not.  Perhaps purpose can be found in the meticulous filmmaking.  Perhaps not.  One shot, during which Mother dribbles a bowl of coffee into son Yoon Do-joon’s mouth as he pisses a puddle against a wall was one of many possible strokes of genius that both provided glorious cinematic eye candy and an impeccable thematic summary: mother gives birth, nurtures, and Son (along with Son’s digestive and urinary tracts, all torn from mother’s womb) expels it as piss.  Farfetched interpretation?  Maybe.  A fantastic shot, nonetheless.

So I laughed, thinking I was laughing with genius.  My friends laughed, thinking they were laughing at awkward filmmaking and uncomfortably placed dance numbers.  Perhaps I was the only smart one. Or the only douchebag laughing at an earnest portrayal of desperation. Or maybe the film was more brilliant than even I thought.  Maybe I, so sycophantically in awe, had become a human genre-fuck of the two spectator archetypes, fragmented in coordination with the genre-fuck of the film I was watching. Maybe I’m just being sycophantic.

The friend who spoke very little French, and to my knowledge, no Korean, thought it was a failed tragedy.  My friend who spoke decent French did, too.  My French friend, a fan of New French Extremism (a movement in which incest and murderous frumpstresses are invariable, to which he was thus desensitized) thought it was a highly successful tragedy; incest and infanticide aren’t alienating, he believed– they are the healthy components to any relatable drama.  I left, adamantly attached to my interpretation, but soon I began to doubt myself:  were each of our interpretations cultural, or based on our cultural limitations?  Do woebegone women spontaneously break out in the twist in most Korean movies?  Was I overly confident in my interpretation of the subtitles?  And, since it was mostly the visuals and the cinematographic wit that I found so hilarious, how did my friend (the near-Frenchless, totally Koreanless one), judging mostly by visuals, find it a mediocre tragedy and not an ingeniously calculated dark, dark comedy?

I realized that movie-going in Paris may be much more complicated than in the States.  Suddenly grammar, reading comprehension, attention-span-while-listening-in-Korean-reading-in-French-and-critiquing-in-English and other egregious aspects of being foreign played into our pseudo-intellectual “that’s so Jooh-Ho”/”well, on my neighbor’s karaoke machine…” post-film dialogue.  Now we were burdened by the notion that every idea we may have had about the movie may have been a fluke of our linguistic ineptitude. Every time I see that face in the metro stations, I am forced to confront my confusion, to wonder, really, is she crying, is she laughing, or is she just a smug little reminder that I am foreign to everything around me, and vice versa?  Probably not.  But she does a damn good twist.

Moze Halpernin is a third-year creative writing student at Oberlin College, and a featured ÉCU blog writer.