'Boomerang Family'

By Oh Jung-hun

When children grow up, find spouses and leave home, parents feel hollow and fall into what psychologists call the “empty-nest syndrome.” However, when their sons and daughter come back after suffering various setbacks in life ― divorce, criminal conviction or financial bankruptcy ― parents have bitterness incomparable to emptiness.

The recently released “Boomerang Family" deals with such a family of losers. While watching the movie, it occurred to me that the reunions of family members for not so desirable reasons could be a new phenomenon in this society of polarizing income and other social conditions.

In the film, the eldest son, Han-mo, has been jobless for a decade and leads a childlike life at home. He is 44, and acts like a child. He spends all day lolling around in bed, making sexually inappropriate gestures even in front of his niece and harassing his younger brother with abusive language and mischievous teasing.

The younger son, In-mo, is a former movie director and also comes home penniless after falling bankrupt. Finally, the daughter of the family also returns home with her own daughter after a divorce.

But the mother of the three grown-up but dependent children does not reveal her bitter feelings to them, and resumes her job to support her children.

This film tells us two reasons why these grown-up children do not reach mental maturity and financial independence. First, the dissolution and rebuilding of families is becoming a very common feature of today’s Korean society so much that people are no longer moved by the phenomenon. The two sons, accustomed to leeching off their aged mother, even give up the idea of standing on their own.

Their mother’s seeming indifference encourages such parasitic living in a way. Instead of rebuking her lazy, demoralized sons, she just keeps grilling the pork to feed them.

There is another decisive factor for the sons’ immaturity: the absence of their father since they were very young. The mother has long tried to make up for the absence of a father figure with her nearly blind love ― or indulgence ― of her children, another aspect of the familial breakup. The fatherless family also signifies the increasing loss of authority in modern Korea.

Second, their failures in life are mostly related with financial inability. This also reflects a new social trend. As the latest statistics indicate, the biggest cause of divorce is economic matters, surpassing spousal infidelity.

This film indirectly shows us that the daughter, divorced three times still believes in the fairytale marriage, complete with wealth and a dedicated spouse. Previously, almost eight out of every 10 divorced couples cite personality differences as the reason for separation. Now an increasing number of couples leave each other because of economic problems.

To sum up, this film tries in its own way to show how and why Korean families are forced to break up and reassemble for economic, generational and demographic reasons, in this society which is one of the most rapidly changing ones in the world.

It depicts the traditional value of familial cohesion as a somewhat suspect and sterile concept. As our society is becoming more compartmentalized or fragmented than ever, family members and coworkers have come to be reduced to as just objects that play a designated role in homes and workplaces.

At the end of the day, our emotional capacity to understand others has all but depleted, resulting in the premature aging of our emotions, from which the other title of this films, “Aged Family,” derives.

“Boomerang Family" puts a magnifying glass on a Korean family. This film touches one of Korea’s serious issues ― the breakdown of families and its reassembly ― trying to seek a solution, though largely in vain.

It gave me an opportunity to ponder how Korean families, mine included, could fall into the same trap unless we ceaselessly reaffirm our relationships and replenish the family with unselfish devotion and sacrifice.

Oh Jung-hun is a high school teacher in Bucheon, Gyonggi province. His email address is dicaprik@hanmail.net.