The Mother and the Bear: Korea Meets Wonderful Winnipeg in This Quirky Rom-Com
By Chris Knight
Rating: A
There’s something wonderfully weird about Winnipeg. The mid-sized city (Canada’s sixth largest) in the centre of the country has always punched above its weight, cinematically speaking, whether in the latest Guy Maddin fever dream or Matthew Rankin’s magnificent Universal Language from 2024.
Johnny Ma seems to have found a spiritual home there with his latest, The Mother and the Bear. The Chinese-born Canadian filmmaker made his previous two features — Old Stone and To Sing To Live, both excellent — in China, but he has relocated for this one and fully leans into the Manitoba city’s oddness.
He films sidewalk snow shovelling as though it were an Olympic sport (maybe it should be!) and uses the offbeat folk song “Wonderful Winnipeg” in the opening. It was also employed as the theme for Maddin’s My Winnipeg, but since Guy himself makes a cameo in Ma’s movie, I’m guessing he was fine with the homage.
The story: Sumi, a 26-year-old Korean immigrant, meets a rabbit and (possibly) a bear in a Winnipeg alley, slips, falls, and is taken to hospital and put into a medically induced coma to aid her recovery. Her mother Sara (Kim Ho-jung) flies in from Korea to look after her, summing up both her character and her maternal relationship with the plaintive line: “None of this would have happened if she just had a husband to take care of her!”
Sara is described in the press notes as “overbearing,” but that simple cliché does a disservice to her multifaceted character. Barely fluent in English and overwhelmed by the city’s winter weather, Sara is flaky one moment, determined the next and, in one scene, hilariously accidentally high on edibles. But she is also resourceful and certain about what she wants.
Her chief desire, beyond her daughter’s recovery, is her daughter’s love life. And so, while Sumi is knocked out, Sara sets up a profile in her name on a dating app. The hospital staff think the widowed mom is putting herself out there and are delighted to help explain “swiping right.”
Sara has high hopes of catfishing a handsome young Korean man named Min (Jonathan Kim), but he has a girlfriend. But she’s white and Min’s father disapproves, so maybe there’s hope. Meanwhile, Sara bumps into the father (Won-Jae Lee) purely by chance when she stumbles into his Korean restaurant looking for something like a home-cooked meal. It’s a small diaspora after all.
There’s an odd mix to the romantic-comedic elements of the film, with at least one twist that I spotted from as far off as one can see a cell tower from a prairie highway, and another that sneaked up, tapped me on the shoulder and said “boo.”
But there’s great writing in the screenplay (also by Ma), and fantastic music choices, including an otherworldly score by Montreal electronic music artist Marie-Helene Leclerc Delorme, and a groovy cover of the old love song “Unchained Melody.”
I would say “third time’s the charm” for Ma’s output, but I was a big of fan of his first two movies as well, so let’s just say: He’s done it again!
The Mother and the Bear. Directed by Johnny Ma. Starring Kim Ho-jung, Won-Jae Lee, and Jonathan Kim. In theatres January 9 (including in Winnipeg!)