Remember Amadeus? The movie that showed Mozart, who composed the greatest musical works, as an uncouth drunk, lout who loved a pinch and a tickle with the local whores? Remember Salieri in the film? The Oscar Award winning performance of F. Murray Abraham as Salieri, the man who dedicated his life to God and divine music but could not produce music that was as divine as Mozart’s works.
What’s that got to do with a K-drama on Netflix about kids in an elementary school?
The Enlightened Moms Club in Seoul is a chat group that buzzes with all kinds of information for moms whose children go to an elite elementary school. You’d think mothers of first graders would just need a chat group for organising playdates and picnics and discussions about children’s colds and inoculations. But these mothers leave the Kota Factory kids (the show that was dedicated to IIT aspirants and their struggles) so far behind, you will watch because you want the best for your kids, just like these Seoul moms.
Green Mothers’ Club gets its name from the green vests the mothers wear when volunteering at the school, their yellow flags regulating traffic when kids cross the street. But the green jacket becomes a sign of another role they play as they turn into selfish monsters trying to ensure that their kid does better than others' kids. At first it’s amusing to watch the mothers behave like mother hens, ushering their kids to school, urging their kids to be the best by saying ‘Hwaiting!’ (sounds like ‘Fighting!’). Soon you see the difference in each of the moms. And oh how I took sides as I watched the slow-to-start show.
The show starts with a quiet woman with two little boys moving to this suburb. Lee Eun-pyo's husband is a cop and is working nights. She believes in letting the kids find their own feet at school. Someone has left a note for her at her new apartment. ‘Be careful of Yu-Bin’s mom’ the note says. Yu Bin is a gifted child, a girl who excels at violin and maths, and her mother is sort of looked on as a ringleader of the moms on the chat group. Eun-pyo’s cousin also lives in the same area and she sort of is a fence-sitter, leaning towards the most popular opinion. The other moms sort of balance out the group. The one who lives in the Penthouse of the building is a beautiful artist who has a French-speaking husband and a gifted child Henry.
It seems like too many characters have been introduced to us, but by gawd! You suddenly find yourself embroiled in the lives of these moms. Anyone with kids will know that most mothers (and fathers) are known in the neighbourhood as someone’s mother or father. It’s a concept not alien to us Indians! Old-time cinema used it effectively in women being addressed as ‘Munne ki amma’ or dads known as ‘Chunnu ke papa’ and so on. Today, school Whatsapp groups address the parents as ‘Neil’s Mom’ or ‘Suhana’s Dad’...
The battles they fight are so close to home, you are either smiling or in tears. You recognise how merciless gossip can be and how judgemental groups can get if you fail to conform to some unwritten rule. Your parenting methods must be in line with the rest of them or your kids lose out on simple things like playground privileges.
I was taken aback to see how a relaxed Eun-pyo suddenly finds herself compulsively leading her kid (who is tested because he’s disruptive and mostly bored in class) to academic excellence because the test results prove that her little boy is a maths genius. In trying to beat the competitive moms at their own games, does Eun-pyo lose it all?
What is the dark secret that Yu-bin's mom holds? Will the jam-making mom who is compelled to intellectualise everything really going to sweep her husband’s rage against her kids under the proverbial carpet? The beautiful artist from the penthouse floor will remind you of Marianne Dashwood the emotionally overwrought sister in Sense And Sensibility (played beautifully by Kate Winslet). She too seems to suffer despite all that wealth.
And yes, there are the kids. Where do they find such talented kids to play the part of a traumatised genius, a happy little kid, a compulsive liar… You may have heard me crib about annoying kids in our movies (Anjali from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is still at the top of that list). The kids are just amazing.
As weekly episodes of this show drop on Netflix, you will realise that the lives of these seemingly perfect moms are not easy at all. And your empathy for these women grows with every facet of their lives exposed. You begin to understand why the heroine Lee Eun-pyo says so little in the first episode, and you don’t wonder if the whole show is going to make her be the stoic helpless woman.
As friendship between the women grows, you realise that you too have a moms group that meets even though the kids don’t need a support system any more, and you have seen kids go through ups and downs in their school years, but you women are still friends…
With moms pushing their kids to study hard and how real estate prices go up because of the school and coaching academies being the best of all neighbourhoods, I thought it might turn into a fun movie like Irrfan Khan starrer Hindi Medium (2017) where his wife insists on moving homes to get their child to a fancy school. But to see that these are first graders and when a child says, ‘I don’t want to disappoint you,’ and another apologises to his mom for not being good enough…my heart just broke… That’s when I realised that although the series started slow, I had breezed through ten episodes already. The next few turned a tad dark and threatening as the darkness of some lives gets exposed. And now I have ordered more Kleenex because I want to meet Yu-bin's mom again, want a happy ending for little Henry, and yes, I want the bad guys caught and taken away… Green Mothers Club has me hooked. Join me?
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