Mother - Hell hath no fury

    Hell hath no fury like a .....mother's love. Slightly unusual that someone who never had a mother watches a two-hour South Korean film called 'Mother' by Bong Joon-ho. An alternative film deserves an alternative review surely! I accompanied a friend who wanted to see the film at the last minute and I had no idea what it was about. Bradford on Avon Film Society is arguably one of the best in the country and its mainly middle class late middle aged audience was full capacity at the screening of this tense psychological thriller. 

   The film is certainly shocking and disturbing not least in exposing taboos such as a retarded man in his early twenties sleeping with his mother, although clearly it emphasised the point he was still a child. The sub titles use the word 'retard' but this is a taboo in Britain so I use the adjective for want of a better description for someone of a simple-minded disposition (I think we call it 'learning difficulties'). In contrast the mother has a powerful mind and a relentless determination to prove the innocence of her somewhat rebellious son accused of murdering a young woman, making Agatha Christie's Poirot look tamely bourgeois in the search for who dunnit. 

  The film is also about justice (coming from unexpected quarters) and as a piece of film making I think is a work of art with very powerful imagery and an Oscar deserving performance by its 59 year old star Kim Hye-ja. There is a powerful surrealistic opening scene of her dancing in a field and as the cameras slowly zoomed in I thought this was a 45 year old woman with the trim and lithe body of a 30 year old. The only part I found predictable in the film was the return to this scene near the end of the story as part of the film genre was flashback and as a film maker myself I could see it coming. 

   To articulate the story and give a clever conventional opinion its best to read the Guardian review by Peter Bradshaw and there is a very high probability he had a mum so I will try to keep this review relevant to my unusual perspective that I watched it through the eyes of someone not having a mum and relying on a fair bit of guess work about what exactly the emotions flying around are all about. Perhaps I am writing this in the hope that somebody else of my disposition might read this!      

   The most powerful scene for me was when the mother discovers her son really did kill the girl (albeit accidentally) and she batters to death the person who witnessed it as he is about to phone the police. She uses a King Dick and although this film has mildly pornographic content a 'King Dick' to the technically unititiated is a giant adjustable spanner used for farm machinery. This scene is more graphic than the nubile sex scene which is sparing to the largely senior audience - graphic in its shocking sound effects - you almost feel the blows. This scene is so ferocious and the subsequent act of the mother setting fire to the house and burning all evidence of the witness illustrates the power of a mother. Perhaps power is a limited word as it gets mixed up with control and a whole gammit of roles and emotions a mother has. Paradoxically whilst in Western culture the mother has more legal rights to underpin her power, this Korean woman was up against corruption in the legal system and public ridicule in her endless pursuit to protect her boy at any cost. No wonder many western women accuse their men of having limited emotional intelligence when the mother, like a hand being cut off, retains the power of the umbilical cord throughout her life?      

   Back to the plot, the son in his simplicity roams around the burned ruins of the house his mother has set alight to remove all evidence of her crime and he finds her metal box containing her accupunture needles (she is an unlicenced practitioner) and right at the end of the film my only confusion is when she can bear the emotions no more she gets on a bus full of dancing parents of sons like her own and uses a needle on her amazingly nubile thigh (for a 59 year old woman!) and I thought she was going to commit suicide but instead she triggered a happiness nerve in  the brain and the film ends with her dancing with the others. 

  From the perspective of my own youth-dominated culture I questioned why the leading character was a woman of 59 with a son of around 21 (I thought having children later in life was a luxury of First World countries?), but perhaps the lines on her face and the experience an older woman carried added to the poignancy. Certainly the face of Kim Hye-ja was amazingly expressive. I like a film that has a really strong central character (such as Gene Hackman in The French Connection) and although my cinema companion (a mother herself) thought the film was ghastly I can say I would uncomfortably watch it again.  
   Although the film was about a mother's protection of her son, the lengths she would go to, and paradoxically the ultimate powerlessness she had. If the film has any message it is always carry your acupunture kit with you if the pain, guilt and anguish gets too much.  

   
The guardian Review of 'Mother' by Peter Bradshaw can be found at:

www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/aug/19/mother-review

Life ends at 45

   Okay so now we've been told. Its official. And I have a sneaking suspicion only people over 45 read my blog. According to the latest News your brain cells are dying earlier than we thought and if the word 'retirement' isn't enough to make any 65 year old feel on the crap heap, being told you are brain dead after 45 is going to really do the trick.

   Well let me tell you I have hardly started living yet and I'm a good few years over 45. I haven't even been married let lone divorced three times and I haven't reached the pinnacle of my creative work yet so there's still a lot to pack in. I did the online mental agility test included in the news item and wondered whether it was an error and intended for twelve year olds. I play at least one game of chess every day and am more in touch with the news than ever before, using an iPad as a very handy device to gather information. I also play and compose music at least twice a week. 

   Although I was deemed "thick" at school in the days when getting into university was actually very difficult I reckon I would leave many young graduates standing if brain/reasoning power was tested today and not least in stamina as my current video project am working roughly fourteen hours a day.

  So, please forgive the lack of modesty here but spurred by increasing irritation that generalisations, frequently contradictory are thrust upon us.  I refuse to succumb to being a victim of Ageism. My uncle who was my guardian in his fifties, when I was seventeen, was a highly capable and distinguished man, being the chairman of the largest Timber Sawmills in Scotland and the Dean of Guild of Glasgow, said to me that a man reaches his prime in his late fifties. Today we are told that the new twenty is the old thirty, that the new forty is the old sixty so this is another piece of unconnected 'official' thinking.

   Whereas I am supposed to be well into an era of 'managed decline' I would prefer to say I am in an era of 'managed time' - with luck another thirty years of active service. One of my heros and someone I once met is the broadcaster John Humphries and who out-speeds and outwits our youthful politicians.

Loss and Integrity

    It was only in August last year (2011) I bumped into an old friend Alan Mitchell who was the kingpin of woodworking magazine editors in the Seventies and Eighties. Out of respect I captured him on film to include in 'Furniture Today Part Three'. 

   With sadness I learned today that Alan had died in early December. I discovered this while Googling for some dates of his editorial office. Alan was a legendary 'fixture' in the woodworking media for many years, in fact a kingpin. Not just that he was a truly democratic and friendly person who went out of his way to scoop interesting stories and even landed up unnannounced at my small furniture gallery in Bath in the mid 1980's, having climbed a very steep hill, to run a feature. 

   It was heartening to see him at the Cheltenham 'Celebration of Craftsmanship and Design' exhibition Private View and he was immediately friendly and thanks to the organizer Jason Heap for having a 'flexible approach' regarding who is invited to Private Views that the impromptu opportunity arose for me to pay my respect to Alan on film. The policy at this major UK annual furniture show before Jason took over was to limit the Private view to clients and exhibitors only, breaking with the great tradition that Private Views are also social events and to use modern media language are the equivalent of Facebook to do business in a social networking environment! 

   Anybody who is in the tough business of sustained economic survival surely knows that you have to think outside the box and consider all sorts of ways to find customers and often the best results come from indirect means. Alan Mitchell was neither a prospective client nor a current craft journalist at this exhibition Private View so under the old regime he would not have been invited but clearly he was a man who gave his life and passion to woodworking and was not one for cultivating favourites or enemies but just did his job fair and square and genuinely liked the people. 

    Magazine editors and the craft media have great power and 'make and break' names. It was unusual to come across a magazine editor with the integrity Alan Mitchell had, but perhaps that was an age when the term might be more frequently used.

    It has been a challenging couple of years for me  - the great furniture maker Alan Peters died in 2009. He was my schoolboy hero and later a good professional acquaintance, someone of great integrity in his work, then a good male friend of mine who seemed to have everything, took his own life in the same year. Then in 2010 my charasmatic and colourful older sister Jill (who once turned down a date with Jimmi Hendrix) died of cancer within about three months, and then my half-sister Barbara died of a brain tumour, having suffered dementia at a shockingly young age. Now in 2012 my aunt who was my guardian and offered me a home when I was 17, is on her deathbed and probably has weeks to live.

Life is strong yet fragile. We know it all, yet we know nothing. We are here today and gone tomorrow, but the show goes on with new kids on the block re-inventing wheels and who one day will follow the same destiny!!