A quirk romantic comedy about a submissive son who falls for the maîtresse of a brothel…
Mama Boy, written and directed by Arvin Chen, is a bittersweet romantic comedy about a sweet and melancholic first love. The Taiwanese-American director, who previously directed Au Revoir Taipei (2010), a story of love and distance, and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (2013), a story of love and sexuality, returns to the screen, this time with a story about love and age. Mama Boy had its world premiere at the Far East Film Festival 2022.
The love affair in question is between Xiao-hong (Kai Ko), a young, shy and awkward 29-year-old, and Sister Lele (Vivian Hsu), the experienced maîtresse of a brothel. Theirs is a love that tiptoes into a welter of unbalanced emotional relationships, penetrating the subtle cracks in their interactions until it finally exposes their problems. But the undisputed prime mover of Mama Boy, as evidenced by the title, is the archetypical mother-son relationship, replete with all its oedipal nuances.
Xiao-hong, before he falls for a mature woman, is a loving and submissive son who is controlled by his overly protective mother Meiling (Yu Tzu-yu). The character is etched with light but precise touches right from the first two shots. First, we see some goldfish swimming phlegmatically in a tank. Then the boy’s face makes its first appearance, framed through the glass of the tank, looking distractedly at the fish. In his bright orange T-shirt, which he wears for almost the entire film, Xiao-hong seems like a goldfish among goldfish who has been swimming for 29 years in the same small tank, going back and forth between the fish store where he works, and the apartment where he lives with his mother.
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Just like those goldfish that have the potential to grow to a large size, but remain small if placed in a cramped bowl, Xia-hong seems stuck in a pre-adolescent phase that prevents him from growing up. He’s extremely shy, unable to talk to women, and tied to a mother whose authority he never questions, even when she forces him to go on dates with complete strangers. Of course, he is still a virgin.
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The glass of the dome in which Xia-hong has been living begins to crack when his cousin decides to drag him off to lose his virginity. In a shabby fake hotel, we make the acquaintance of Sister Lele, a woman in her fifties who has clearly seen a lot in her life, but still seems surprised, and a little fascinated, by the innocence of this 29-year-old. Sister Lelehas also been heavily affected by the relationship with her son Weijie (Fandy Fan), an impetuous bum who constantly asks her for money.
Actress Vivian Hsu, with her dark and penetrating gaze, and her melancholic and sweet smile, portrays Sister Lele’s resigned disenchantment with incredible simplicity and a lightness of touch.Meanwhile, Kai Ko, who departs from his previous swaggering and malicious roles in The Apple Of My Eye and Moneyboys, brings life to an introverted character who uses his stiffness as a form of expression.
Through slow straight-forward shots, director Chen gradually reveals the unfolding of an atypical relationship which is based on a game of substitutions in which each character is in search of what they do not have. But Mama Boy is not only the story of a boy who falls in love, in a Freudian way, with a woman who resembles his mother, it’s also the story of a woman who seeks consolation in the company of a boy who is the opposite of the son she failed to raise satisfactorily.
Thanks to the delicate and harmonious interpretation of the two main performers, and the fairy-tale-like photography of Jake Pollock, the film avoids becoming a mere analysis of a complex system of emotional relationships. It goes beyond that to show, without judgment, the story of a first love has the strength to break down the walls of an oppressive comfort-zone. The innocence of this love manages to bring lightness to a disillusioned heart.
The screenplay by Chen and Sunny Yu is simple and straightforward and does not pretend to be a masterpiece of psychological analysis. It’s perhaps too slow in some parts, although this does reinforce the slowness with which Xiao-hong reaches emotional maturity. The combination of a romantic plot and a (late-)coming-to-age structure, and the focus on the mother-son relationship, brings a degree of universality to the film. After all, everyone has experienced a first love at some time in life, and first loves are always enlightening, no matter how strange, unusual, or painful they may be.