“The Mother and the Bear” Struggles to Capture Connection
The dynamic between parent and child will forever be a subject for filmmakers. Even when the lives of two people are so intrinsically intertwined, there’s often much they can’t understand about each other. Children are the products of their parents in their attributes, attitudes, and personalities. A parent’s nurturing shapes a child, but there comes a point when all that teaching falls away and the young adult has to build a life on their own. Johnny Ma’s The Mother and the Bear exists at a crossroads where a child has begun their path of independence and the role of the parent has long since shrunk.
A few years prior to the beginning of the film, Sumi (Leere Park) emigrated to Winnipeg from South Korea. She works as a music teacher and has a small apartment and a cat. It seems to be a simple life, but the audience doesn’t have a long time to get to know Sumi. While walking home after work on a snowy night, she’s injured in a fall and put into a medically induced coma. Her mother, Sara (Kim Ho-jung ), rushes to Winnipeg to be by her daughter’s side at the hospital. As she waits for Sumi to wake up, Sara tries to understand the life her daughter has built here, thousands of miles away from the place she considers home.
courtesy of FilmNation Entertainment
The Mother and the Bear takes place during the chilly winter months, with snow everywhere and the characters perpetually bundled against the cold. Winnipeg’s brutal weather makes it a tough place to live, and at one point Sara exasperatedly asks, “Why does my daughter want to live here?” It’s the central thesis that explains why the relationship between Sumi and Sara is so strained. The audience doesn’t need flashbacks to see what has happened here. Sumi wanted a chance to spread her wings, as nearly all kids inevitably do. A person could have the most glorious childhood ever and still want to move thousands of miles away, but Sara doesn’t see it that way. She sees the move as a calculated and cruel personal attack. The strain of this relationship is the result of Sumi’s life not matching the expectations Sara had set out. She struggles to see that Sumi deserves to shape her own life. That her daughter might know best in this scenario.
courtesy of FilmNation Entertainment
At times, The Mother and the Bear plays like a whimsical, fish-out-of-water rom com as Sara strikes up a friendship with the divorced owner of a Korean restaurant (Lee Won-jae). At other times, the film rehashes the familiar beats of a mother awkwardly attempting to bond with a child she doesn’t understand. What makes this difficult, though, is that the person Sara is supposed to be learning about is in a coma. While Sara does meet someone who identifies as a friend of Sumi’s, Sara spends most of her time with the restaurant owner or by herself. It’s nearly impossible to get to know someone like that, especially when Sara doesn’t even attempt to use the parts of her daughter she has access to. She’s staying in Sumi’s apartment but doesn’t see what’s there, only what’s missing: a picture of Sumi’s deceased father, healthy food in the fridge, and a husband who could be taking care of everything.
Instead of The Mother and the Bear being a film about a mother and daughter reconnecting, it’s about a mother who decides she has spent too long in hibernation in her own life. That’s a fair realization for Sara to have, but it does feel like it comes at the expense of her child, based on the film’s final moments. It’s hard to make a movie about a relationship when half of the duo isn’t explored. There are some warm moments about how food and language can immediately anchor us to a place we miss, how people can fall in love even when they thought those feelings were behind them, and how we may not understand our loved one but we can still support them. Unfortunately, The Mother and the Bear ends with what is still a fundamentally massive gap between mother and daughter.
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