Yeon Soon, a newly hired and dedicated philosophy teacher drifts apart from her mother Gyeong-ah, a lonely, but thoughtful caregiver. Their superficial relationship reaches deeper levels from the moment Gyeong-ah receives a video message conserning her daughter's private life. Both women have, firstly, to face a degrading challenge, then, themselves.
Gyeong-ah's Daughter screened at Busan International Film Festival
As it can easily inferred from the film's title, a Korean “tiger” mother is entirely focused on the child she raises or the child she has raised. In particular, the “child” is a talented, passionate and independent, all-grown-up, young woman. The problem, though, seems to be that Gyeong-ah isn't characterized anymore by the term “focused mother”. She is rather nosey and disrespectul to her daughter's privacy. As a result, Yeon Soon decides to give her the least of information she can when it comes to her whereabouts. Gyeong-ah finds out about her daughter's life in a disturbing way and while Yeon Soon tries to handle the situation as the level-headed woman she is, her mum does the exact opposite. I can't think of a mother that in the real world wouldn't act like Gyeong-ah in a case like the one that is presented here. The question is, when should you stop from being a mother and when you should start to become a life companion to your kid.
Kim, for her first full feature, chooses to pose her questions about modern life and the lifechanging, unpredictable events that could easily cause us a mental chaos by disguising them with the looks of a classic, polished Korean drama, quick paced in its first part, melodramatic and slow in its second, with a sollution that is indeed a crowd-pleaser but still, it comes as a consequense of the mother's tactless behavior (a great gimmick, if the creators did it on purpose).
The incident that occurs in the movie is one of the most popular violating acts of the recent years driven from our dangerous ease with technology. The troubled mother-daughter relationship is a vehicle that carries the thoughts of the power of the unexpected, the limitations of sharing fragments of our life with others and eventually, Kim elaborates the concept of revenge and the real use of it. If it really is any…
Seriously? Director Kim is a woman and a feminist yup maybe get her pronouns correct!