Written at the time of the films' American releases. Since then, Bong Joon-ho directed the film Parasite, which won the 2020 Best Picture Oscar, as well as awards for best script and best direction.
"The Knots of the Heart"
"A boy's best friend is his mother."
Mother Yoon (Hye-ja Kim) ekes out a living dispensing naturopathic herbs and running an underground acupuncture practice, all for her backward son Do-joon (Bin Won), 28 and a perfect example of not knowing what he doesn't know. With severe ADD, he has problems with memory retention; the least little thing, shiny or not, will distract him. The phrase "Hold that thought" is lost on him, an impossibility with his sieve-like mind. His type never learns.
You'd think his mother would. Mother Yoon watches her son like a hawk, and though she doesn't approve of him running with "a bad crowd," she can do nothing, or else the boy will storm off and get into some other trouble, or go drinking until all hours, or get beat up. Something...and usually bad. The cops know all about him. He's crossed their paths more than once.
So, when a young girl ends up dead on the night Do-joon goes on a bender, the police arrest him and hold him for trial. And he has no answers for what he was doing that night. This sends Mother into a maternal tizzy, and she works the neighborhood, trying to make nice with the victim's family, obtaining the services of a shady lawyer, but when those avenues prove unrewarding, she begins to investigate the case on her own, pursuing every blind alley and path paved with her Good Intentions.
And you know where that leads.
One could say that this is a Hitchcockian nightmare with its themes of dangerous Moms and wrong-man incarcerations, butMother(aka "Madeo"), directed by Bong Joon-ho (who directed the monster hit The Host) hails from Polanski-town,with its themes of obsessiveness, self-delusion and destruction. As played by the internalized Kim, the title character is so wrapped up in her maternal self-sacrifice that that she doesn't see how much she's giving up to save her son. As she digs deeper into the victim's past, she must come to grips with her own, and for all the searching her final destination is her own Soul.
Sounds grim, and even a little cruel. Cruel, it is. But, Bong—as he showed with his previous monster movie—has created an intricate little trap of a film, with moments of horror and humor combined, sometimes with their arms so tightly wound each other, they could strangle, whether from love or malice. One senses an ironic glee from the director, who keeps inserting little touches of humor into the proceedings to keep things from getting too heavy, and makes one think that maybe God puts us through such trials, because it's such good sport to see us flail.
If Bong is having a good time torching the ants in Mother, Australian director Nash Edgerton is chortling and cracking open a Foster's, making life miserable for the denizens of The Square. It, also, is a tightly wound thriller—more in the classic film-noir mode—with its Aussie blue-collar workers effortlessly slipping into "tough-guy" mode. It begins, as many noir's do—with an illicit affair, and the attempt to make it legit—but it soon crumbles around its own foundation, turning into quicksand. Like construction, it's not a good idea to go in and throw away the blue-print.
Foreman Raymond Yale (David Roberts in a fine "everyman" performance) is building a resort of "honeymoon suites" for Hubbard Construction in Sydney, Australia. He's getting a bit of side-work in, as well, (or "a bit of mischief" as is the phrase) in an affair with Carla Smith (Claire van der Boom). Both are trapped in loveless marriages: he's just "middle-age-crazy" and her husband (Anthony Hayes) is a low-life criminal. One day she discovers hubby has stashed a bag of cash in the attic—a sizable sum. She decides to tell Ray in an attempt for them to skip out and start anew with a nest-egg. Ray's hesitant. Carla takes that as a sign that an affair is all it's going to be and dumps him.
And if everything was going to be fine..that's where the movie would end. Ray can't give up Carla, so they plan their escape and to hide the theft of the loot, they arrange to burn down the Smith's house—the evidence of the switched bag will burn up, and no one will be the wiser.
Well, the last part's true, anyway. The Square is a noir deep in the tradition-ditch of such illicit classics as Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Body Heat. The perfect plot starts to unravel before it can be set in motion, and soon both Carla and Ray are hip-deep in complications that get worse and worse, and messier and messier—the perfect trial for a relationship. For all the efforts to "make things better," things simply couldn't get worse...until they do.
Director Edgerton, who, before he started turning out short films*worked as a stunt-man, always finds the good angles to shoot from, and is more than happy to lead the audience into several very uncomfortable situations that have a gritty realism to them, all to make the audience squirm as much as the characters do, then tops it off with a neat little irony that twists the knife. Like his protagonists, this director might be too clever for his own good. It will be interesting to see what he does in the future and whether he'll deepen his material. For now, though, as an exercise in noir, this one is pretty special.
* The Square is preceded by Edgerton's 2007 shortSpider, which is a good preparation for how sadistic a film-maker he can be to his audience. The less said the better, but don't be surprised if the film leaves you wary of the director, and tempted to walk out before the feature starts.
Dead Calm(Philip Noyce, 1989) Around 1966, Orson Welles decided to make a thriller, with a small cast and the simplest of plots in an effort to appeal to a mass audience, who had not supported his Shakespearean films of the 1950's and 1960's. It was more like his pulp-thriller films, that he would alternate with his more serious films—The Stranger, The Lady From Shanghai, Touch of Evil, and Mr. Arkadin. The film, entitled The Deep, was based on a 1963 pulp novel by Charles Williams called "Dead Calm" about a couple sailing on their honeymoon who encounter the lone survivor of a sailing disaster. The straggler's story doesn't quite add up, so the husband steers towards the imperiled ship, while the "guest" sleeps down below. When they arrive, the husband goes to investigate, discovering that his suspicions are correct, finding two other survivors who tell him that the man who had rowed to his ship had managed to kill another passenger and suffered a psychotic break. The information comes a little late as, back on his ship, the man has awakened and taken control, sailing away and kidnapping his wife.
Welles shot the film from 1966 through 1969, self-financing (as he usually did) and getting his minimal cast together (himself, Jeanne Moreau, Michael Bryant, Oja Kodar, and Laurence Harvey) when funds were available. At some point, the film was abandoned without a climactic scene being shot, and in 1973 Harvey died, which effectively prevented the film from ever being finished without extensive re-shoots. Welles moved on.
Welles passed on in 1985. Before then, producer Tony Bill had been trying to obtain the rights from Welles, but was always rebuffed. After Welles' death, he gave the book to director Noyce, who persuaded George Miller and Terry Hayes, fresh off their international hit, The Road Warrior, to see if they could acquire the rights from Kodar, Welles' mistress at the time of his death. The story was bought and plans started for a new film made by the now-burgeoning Australian film industry, with Miller producing, Hayes writing, Noyce directing and, as the two leads, Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman—who had appeared in Hayes' mini-series "Bangkok Hilton" and Hayes' and Noyce's "Vietnam". American Billy Zane was cast as the lone survivor of the ship mis-hap. Hayes' screenplay eliminated any other survivors. The story would be a triangle on the high seas.
Noyce's film begins with interior shots of a car making its way through disorienting low-vision rain squalls only to end in an accident that kills the child of Royal Australian Navy officer John Ingram (Neill) and his wife, Rae (Kidman). To deal with their grief, Ingram takes his wife sailing across the Pacific on their elaborate yacht. For awhile, it's just the two of them and their dog and an extensive ocean far from land and memory.
Enter Hughie Warriner (Zane), or more specifically, his ship which the Ingrams see is taking on water. John sails over to the ship to find that a survivor is rowing over to them. They take Hughie on-board and he says that he is the lone survivor on the ship, the others having died of food poisoning.
But, John is suspicious of the story, so once the exhausted Hughie is asleep below, he rows over to the ship, only to find that it is indeed sinking, but the bodies on-board did not succumb to food poisoning, but to a violent attack, the evidence pointing to none other than Hughie—the very guy who is on-board his ship with his wife. The stowaway takes control of the ship, leaving Ingram alone on the disabled vessel to try and keep it afloat long enough to get it back under power in an effort to pursue the vessel.
The movie then concentrates on two fields of struggle: John Ingram on the abandoned boat, trying to keep it afloat and under power; Rae with their dog (who is, frankly, no help) and a deranged individual who isn't afraid to knock her out in order to commandeer their boat—she has no idea what John has discovered on the wrecked ship that he is now stuck on. While John is struggling to keep things afloat, Rae has to manage with Hughie who vacillates between bi-polar mood swings of fawning neediness to homicidal rage (with over-lying delusions of grandeur). One is not sure which Hughie one is going to get at any moment, so toad-like is his squirming mind.
Noyce ramps up the tension with obvious sexual dynamics. The marriage between John and Rae is an visual mis-match—Neill was in his 40's at the time of filming while Kidman celebrated her 20th birthday during that time. We've become inured to the age differences between romantic leads in the movies—well, you have if you've watched John Wayne or Bogart movies—but, the disparity in their ages creates a risk factor for the solvency of the marriage even before Hughie's third wheel makes the cramped boat too crowded.
And they are on this trip because of the recent tragedy of losing their child. What frame of mind Rae could be in and how vulnerable she could be in a crisis is always in the back of the mind. How does she resolve the issues, how does she fend off Hughie, who, though unstable, IS a bit of a hunk and closer to her age (even though he is a childish maniac). Hayes and Noyce run a razor's edge of tension for the audience, but the key ingredient in their conspiracy is their barely-out-of-her-teens lead actress, Nicole Kidman.
The role would be tough enough for anybody (Barbara Stanwyck does something similar in the 1953 thriller Jeopardy, but that's Stanwyck) but for someone that young, the idea must have been daunting. Kidman, however, is a quick study, able to turn her mood on a dime that is quite convincing to Hughie—and, at times, the audience. Kidman's Rae is a daunting opponent, but her youth makes you worry about her. By turns seductive and wary, she splits her time trying to communicate with John, while seducing Hughie—trying to delay a situation that will turn outright sexual, and conniving time to plan dealing with him if the situation turns violent, stockpiling weapons and her sleeping prescription to knock him out. It's a very contained cat-and-mouse game. But, one begins to suspect her character does not have allies in the writer or director, putting her at constant risk.
At one point, they make it unavoidable and she does have uncomfortable sex with Hughie because she runs out of ways to deflect it. But, once she does, she amps up the attack, drugging him into unconsciousness and taking back command of the ship to steer it back to her husband. Still, the audience's edginess is not calmed.
For all the jolts and fireworks in the film's conclusion, the filmmakers were forced to go back and add a coda, a "sting in the tail," as the original cut left audiences dissatisfied with the way Hughie's fate is left unresolved and providing a more definitive end with a bit more...flare. It's over-the-top and a lot more jarring than the rest of the film, even if audiences wanted a more dramatic death-stroke. Also, the way it's presented is a bit unfortunate as it weakens Rae's character a bit, making her a damsel in distress that can only be rescued by John's timely arrival, which upturns the partnership the couple have spent the entire movie bonding to dispatch him.
It's a blunt "playing for keeps" ending that snaps so much of the work done by everyone in the film, which is less of a thriller, than a "tensioner," from the gamut from sexual to circumstantial, never leaving the audience comfortable or complacent. It doesn't quite scuttle the picture, but it does take some of the wind out of its sails.
