Director Bong Joon-ho
Bong Joon-ho at Cannes winning the Palme d'Or prize
PARASITE
(Gisaengchung) B+
South Korea (132 mi)
2019 ‘Scope d: Bong Joon-ho
Following last
year’s festival circuit success of Hirokazu Koreeda’s heavily acclaimed Shoplifters
(Manbiki kazoku) (2018) and Lee Chang-dong’s underrated 2018
Top Ten List #8 Burning (Beoning), they apparently paved the way for Bong
Joon-ho’s new film receiving plenty of accolades after winning the prestigious
Palme d’Or prize at Cannes (by unanimous decision), the first South Korean film
to earn that distinction, earning a whopping $70 million dollars in South Korea
before its American release, devising a satiric black comedy that reveals a
devastating chasm between rich and poor.
What starts out as a cleverly ingenious scam from an impoverished family
to fake their way, one by one, into working for a filthy rich family without
them ever realizing they are related, eventually goes awry, veering into
unconventional Hollywood horror, becoming so over the top that the film
deflects from the exquisitely dramatic build-up of character development to
superbly constructed scenes of mayhem, becoming a perversely well-made free-for-all
of wretched malaise, given a kind of apocalyptic thriller twist where the world
is turned on its end, creating boldly audacious mood shifts not seen since
Marin Ade’s 2017
Top Ten List #2 Toni Erdmann, allowing all the pulp fiction tension to
dissipate, leaving audiences quietly dazed afterwards. This is a more playful version of Jean
Genet’s One Act play The Maids,
loosely based upon the infamous Papin
sisters, expanded into a sharply written comic satire on class divisions
and the principles of social order in Claude Chabrol’s La
Cérémonie (1995), a domestic thriller standing somewhere between comedy and
horror. While Chabrol offers a more
classically eloquent portrait of scathing bourgeois satire, like Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, where the lower
class servants sarcastically make fun of the idyll rich, Bong’s film has a few
more rough edges, where the troublesome family at the root of an otherwise
loving family drama overindulges their reach, biting off more than they can
chew, leading to unexpected circumstances beyond their control, becoming a
morality play, an exasperated comedy gone awry, leading to tragic results. The Kim family in question is headed by the
father, Song Kang-ho as Kim Ki-taek, an unemployed chauffeur. Song is a recognizable, high-profile South
Korean actor who has worked previously with Bong as the bungling detective in Memories
of Murder (Salinui chueok) (2003)
and the slow-witted father in THE HOST (2006), but also Lee Chang-dong as the
quirky mechanic in Secret
Sunshine (2007) and Park Chan-wook in various films, while getting his
start with Hong Sang-soo. His
no-nonsense wife, a former hammer-throw champion from the medal on the wall, is
Jang Hye-jin as Chung-sook, while Choi Woo-shik is the older brother Ki-woo,
and Park So-dam is the younger sister Ki-jung, both failing their college
entrance exams. The Kim family lives in
a cramped basement folding pizza boxes to earn a living, where we get an idea
what they’re about when we discover they’re stealing the upstair neighbor’s
Wi-Fi connection, initially befuddled when the neighbor changes their password,
finding an active signal in an elevated section of the far corner of the room.
This family is not
afraid to use crude language to comic effect, while they’re most proud of
Ki-jung’s unique gift of forgery where she’s able to produce professional
looking documents, giving them fake credentials they’ve never actually
achieved. This comes in handy when a
friend who’s leaving to study in America recommends Ki-woo for a job teaching
English as a personal tutor for a teenage daughter of a wealthy Park
family. Realizing they have an
artistically inclined young son that could use some art therapy, he recommends
a noted specialist that just happens to be his sister. Weaseling their way into the Park family was
easy, but their working techniques are masterful, playing on the elitist
ambitions of the rich, becoming sympathetic figures while literally hoodwinking
this family for needed cash. What’s
amazing about the wealthy family is the grandiosity of their home, a sleek and
modern look designed by an architect, given the appearance of a Glass House
with floor to ceiling windows looking out onto the luscious greenery of their
back lawn, literally an oasis, or an idyllic paradise on earth. The all-knowing housekeeper, Lee Jung-eun as
Gook Moon-gwang, is a holdover from when the original architect lived there,
knowing every crack and crevice in the home.
The family’s isolation and quirky behavior, however, may remind viewers
of Yorgos Lanthimos, a filmmaker whose characters defy comprehension, inventing
surrealist imagery to accompany their outrageous behavior. While the boring Park parents are incredibly
gullible, so easy to manipulate, they generate little sympathy, as they have it
all, apparently, but don’t seem to deserve it, as they simply don’t have the
capacity to empathize. Resorting to
deviously underhanded methods, the Kim family entraps both the family driver
and the housekeeper, causing both to be fired, their jobs filled by casual
acquaintances, recommended professionals they just happen to know, bringing in
expert driver Kim as the chauffeur and their suddenly transformed mother with
her newly coiffed hair as the housekeeper, so everyone has a foot in the door
carrying out their mission with military precision. While they gush over their apparent success,
the kid figures them out (though no one believes him), as each hired employee
brings with them a peculiar smell that is not particularly agreeable, something
akin to a poor man’s smell that’s more evocative of their own filthy
subterranean quarters that can never be scrubbed clean, sending them scampering
to use different deodorants and shampoos in an attempt to mask the odor. But it’s a prevailing theme that exists
throughout the film, a sharp critique of capitalism, with the rich and poor
deviously dependent on the other, where humiliation is a bought and sold
commodity that comes at a price, slowly taking its toll over time, with the
camera cleverly moving back and forth between the two homes that couldn’t be
more strikingly different, as if from two separate and starkly unequal worlds,
a return to Kurosawa’s HIGH AND LOW (1963) disparity, becoming a mind-bending
yet playful journey through various genre films, with the director in full
display of his myriad of talents.
The turning point
occurs when the Park family decides to take their son camping, allowing the
Kim’s to bask in the glory of this immaculate estate, raiding the icebox and
liquor cabinet, picnicking on the lawn as we watch Chung-sook do a spectacular
hammer throw before having a gloried Buñuelian feast mimicking the infamous
“Last Supper” sequence in VIRIDIANA (1961) on the premises, imagining
themselves as the permanent occupants, growing deliriously drunk and deluded as
their accumulated trash and dirty dishes start piling up, leaving a mess
everywhere you look while they’re entranced by watching the passing storm out
the window, hypnotically mesmerized until the doorbell rings, immediately
sending them into panic mode. It turns
out to be Moon-gwang, the dispelled housekeeper pleading in a raging downpour
that she left something behind in the basement, asking to come inside. While the rest of the family hides,
Moon-gwang disappears into the blackness of the basement, which turns out to be
a secret bunker, like an air-raid shelter, built in the event of an attack from
North Korea with its own living quarters inside, which is where her husband,
Park Myung-hoon as Geun-sae, has been hiding for years to evade ravenous loan
sharks. In one of the more deranged
moments, he does an outrageously demented impersonation of his wife as a North
Korean news announcer. Incredulous at
the discovery, the rest of the family awkwardly falls down the stairs in utter
astonishment, with Moon-gwang cleverly capturing their appearance on her phone,
threatening to expose the entire family, turning the tables, gaining the upper
hand, basically ordering them to do whatever she pleases, suggesting even
amongst the poor there’s always a power dynamic, a Darwinian survival of the
fittest, all of which quickly changes when the Park family calls to announce
their arrival in 8-minutes, driven away from their campsite by the storm. Pandemonium sets in, where hilarity quickly
turns to tragedy, including an all-out assault for control of their phone,
playing nasty, as unexpected consequences ensue while they’re racing against
time to clean up their mess. The fear of
being exposed drives them into temporary insanity, completely altering the look
of the film, as the frenzied battle sets the stage for new territory, where the
hyper-exaggerated delirium recalls Kim Ki-Young’s iconic Korean B-movie
masterpiece THE HOUSEMAID (1960), where a supposedly stable household is
upended by twisted transgressions that for the most part remain under the
surface, carefully balancing tension and claustrophobia until all hell breaks
loose, again coinciding with a mammoth storm of epic POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972)
proportions, literally flooding the lower depths of the Kim neighborhood,
drowning out any safe space. Mixing the
absurdity of surrealism with graphic South Korean horror, Bong stages an
infamous birthday party sequence for the young Park child that quickly goes
wildly off the rails in a circus-like spectacle gone terribly wrong, creating
an utterly devastating catastrophe of legendary status. While the finale meanders a bit before finally
coming to a quietly somber closing, it never achieves the moral complexity of
serious contemplation, but it does provide the razzle dazzle of provocation,
becoming a socially conscious parable for our times.
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