Film Screenings / Programs / Series
MOTHERx5
May 6 – May 20
CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: Since the film series "Mother5" was intended to coincide with Mother's Day weekend, as well as due to logistical issues with importing some of the prints we planned to screen, we've reconceived the series as an online program. Of the five films we intended to show, three are available online: Mikio Naruse’s MOTHER (OKAASAN) is on the Criterion Channel; Albert Brooks’s MOTHER is on multiple platforms (Amazon, Google, Tubi, Vudu, and YouTube); and thanks to Magnolia Pictures, we’re able to offer an online streaming engagement of Bong Joon-ho’s MOTHER (MADEO), with 50% of the rental sales benefiting Anthology. To watch the Bong Joon-ho film, click here. (Meanwhile, Vsevolod Pudovkin’s MOTHER / MAT is part of Anthology’s Essential Cinema collection, so it will screen again in the future as part of that cycle.) The text for the series and the descriptions for the three available films are below:
Anthology celebrates Mother’s Day with a series showcasing five films whose relevance to the holiday is unmistakably inscribed in their titles. But don’t let the shared title and theme fool you: in most respects these films are radically different from each other. They were made in distinctly different periods (from the mid-1920s to 2009), produced in far-flung parts of the world, and adopt wildly varying tones (from the revolutionary montage of Pudovkin’s film to the heartrending melodrama of Mikio Naruse’s, and from the dry comedy of Albert Brooks’s take to the genre-crossing craziness of Bong Joon-ho’s volatile follow-up to THE HOST). But they’re masterpieces, each and every one, while the eponymous mothers that anchor each film represent some of the most memorable characters to grace the silver screen. Larger-than-life in their tenaciousness, life force, and the contradictions at play in their volcanic personalities, these are maternal figures far removed from a staid, domestic conception of motherhood.
Bong Joon-ho
MOTHER / MADEO
(2009, 129 min) Now streaming via Magnolia Pictures, with 50% of rental sales benefitting AFA!
“This tale of a 27-year-old village idiot, Do-joon (action heartthrob Won Bin), and the local madwoman who is his single parent, Hye-Ja (played by, as well as named for, South Korean TV’s beloved icon of maternal virtue Kim Hye-ja), quickly darkens once someone bludgeons a local schoolgirl and leaves her body draped like a flag on the roof of an abandoned building. The crime literally hangs over the town. Do-joon, who is extravagantly oafish as well as mentally challenged, had a drunken encounter with the victim; he’s accused of her murder and easily confused into signing a confession. With the simpleton packed off to prison, Hye-ja’s hyper-aroused maternal instincts drive the movie. […] Pushing MOTHER into a realm beyond routine policier is the giddy realization that there may be no lengths to which Hye-ja won’t go to establish Do-joon’s innocence – and that, although he might indeed be innocent, the mother-son dyad, vividly embodied by two actors cast blatantly against type, is founded on its own guilty secrets.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE
Mikio Naruse
MOTHER / OKAASAN
(1952, 98 min)
“Kinuyo Tanaka, in a characteristically beautiful performance, plays a newly widowed mother of three trying to make a go of the family dry-cleaning business. Her story is told through the eyes of the elder daughter, played by the bright and sensitive teenage actress Kyoko Kagawa. A perennial favorite in Japan, MOTHER is somewhat atypical of Naruse’s films of the period in its unabashed sentimentality. But as Audie Bock notes, ‘Although the story elements are the stuff of a standard “mother piece” tear-jerker, Naruse and his adept scenarist Mizuki have fashioned them into something that is much more mood and slice-of-life, lacking a climax and a definitive ending like all Naruse’s best work.’ MOTHER was the first postwar Japanese film to be shown in Europe; there, with its portrayal of street and family life from the refreshing point of view of a youngster, it was inevitably compared with the Italian neorealist films that had recently emerged.” –PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
Albert Brooks
MOTHER
(1996, 104 min)
“All of writer-director-actor Albert Brooks’s comedy features are good, but this one, about a twice-divorced science fiction writer moving back in with his mother (Debbie Reynolds) so he can figure out why he has problems with women, is probably the most accessible and best realized. For all the seriousness of the subject matter, Brooks and his customary cowriter Monica Johnson make it pretty hilarious. Brooks’s comedies, like Woody Allen’s, are basically multifaceted reflections on neurosis, but the probing goes a lot deeper, and the human landscape is usually more generously furnished. Understanding isn’t limited to the lead character – there’s every bit as much insight into the characters of Reynolds and Rob Morrow (the hero’s kid brother, a sports agent). A must-see.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER
