Boomerang Family (2013)

There are families with black sheep, and then there are black sheep families. The dysfunctional kindred of Hae-sung Song’s fantastically obsidian comedy are like a low-class, anti-intellectual, economically ruined Royal Tenenbaums: the oldest, a college graduate who never realised his potential and now considers suicide (Hae-il Park); the schlubby, braggadocios younger brother stuck in a perpetual state of arrested development (Je-mun Yun); and their sister, a flaky upper-class gal who bought into the wrong marriage and picked up some bruises (Hyo-jin Kong).

This petulant trio are forced back together by financial or personal crisis, and take lodgings with their put-upon mother (Yeo-jeong Yoon, also starring in Behind The Camera at the Korean Film Festival), and for the first hour Boomerang Family observes in blackly comic detail the foibles of this headcase clan. Song’s screenplay achieves a delicate balance of brutally nasty humour and genuine pathos, with every scene of the sibling’s peevish squabbling and squawking underlined by a finer commentary on the nature of their division – through beatings physical and verbal, we get a sense of how these character’s lives divided from childhood, and the one-floor, three-room home soon becomes a warzone for class, gender and intellect.

Along for the ride and suffering the brunt of it is sister Mi-yeon’s daughter Min-kyeong (Ji-hee Jin), whose flailing family are getting in the way of her adolescence. One brilliant scene finds brothers In-mo and Han-mo temporarily unifying to bully Min-kyeong into giving up the pizza she paid for, and as the juvenile ex-con Han-mo beats and farts in the face of this eternally put-upon teen, the belly laughs are coming through gritted teeth – the same goes when Min-kyeong has her pocket money extorted for a smoking secret.

This first hour flies by in a fluster, with Song’s dense emotional mapping landing big laughs and several touching moments (an early suicide attempt is echoed at the half-way point in a moment for a character so pathetic that it bypasses heartbreak), but it’s during the second act that the film will really divide audiences. Gone are the childish antics in favour of a drama about brotherhood and the strength of family ties under duress from external factions – bully each other as they may, this family stand no messing from outsiders, and In-mo and Han-mo’s relationship (under a mob thriller setup) arrives at a destination both profound and unexpected.

At first this feels like no more than reheated (and misplaced) leftovers from Song’s previous film, 2010’s A Better Tomorrow, in which masculinity and brotherhood are tried by the moral divisions of a life in crime. Perhaps the tonal gearshift is too quick, but Boomerang Family never recovers from this transition, and while the second act is more than efficient – it’s every bit as pitiless and funny as the first – it lives in the shadow of what was once a complex family portrait.

It is known in the first half that Han-mo is a part-time gangster in love with his hairdresser, but these facts work in comic juxtaposition with his home life, where he lazes on the sofa and the exact machinations of his mob work remain unknown. Han-mo is simply more interesting in a tanktop than a suit, and nothing in his second-act development can match a icky masturbation scene whose dark implications repeat on this family – it also represents in microcosm the way Song can masterfully imbue a scene of breezy and light-footed comedy with serious dramatic weight.

The performances are uniformly terrific, and ensure that even when the film’s dramatic footing becomes undone, and the tone wobbles, that we have empathy for these lonely and hopeless souls. Song understands that they cannot exist in a morbid vacuum of self-obsession, and that humour opens them up to each other and the audience – by the end, when a bloody fist-fight feels a hundred miles away from the morally dangerous emotional ballet which defined the first half, it is our compassion for this odd lot which allows the silliness to find a genuine and lasting resonance.