Koreans don’t count, perhaps? Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year, has been Oscar-nominated for best picture as well as “international feature film” (as best foreign language film has been daftly re-dubbed this year), for directing, for film editing, for production design and for original screenplay. Yet this remarkable, thoroughly deserved success has made no difference at all to the predictable controversy about the lack of diversity in this year’s awards. Odd!
You definitely want to see Parasite, a stunningly original movie, and maybe it’s best to know no more than that simple fact about it before you do. When it premiered at Cannes, its director Bong Joon-ho pleaded for nothing to be disclosed about the story beyond what is in the trailers, even though it’s not the kind of film that depends upon one big twist at the end. It’s much more consistently surprising than that.
Set in contemporary Seoul, it’s about two families who are mirror images of each other, one rich, the Parks, one poor, never given a family name, and the relationship that develops between them.
We meet the family of Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) first, four adults, all unemployed and living in desperate circumstances: a cramped, smelly semi-basement flat looking up into a rough street, where drunks piss on to their window and fumigation trucks gas them like vermin.
They’re supportive of each other but they haven’t got a hope or a plan. The mother, Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin), is an ex-athlete, father Ki-taek (Bong’s regular star Song Kang-ho) has suffered multiple business failures. Both of their children, Ki-woo and his sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam), are smart but have repeatedly failed university entrance exams. They’re so broke their wifi has been cut off and they spend their time trying to get reception by piggy-backing others.
Then a student friend brings Ki-woo a present, a lucky rock said to bring wealth, and offers him a lifeline: the chance to take over his cushy job teaching English to the daughter of a rich family, the Parks. Ki-woo and his sister fake up a university certificate for him to take to the interview. “I don’t think of this as forgery, I just printed out the document a bit early,” he says — this dialogue being snappy enough to still be funny in subtitles.
The Parks’ house is a huge step-up in life, literally. It’s at the top of a hill, behind a wall, up many stairs, a vast minimalist palace overlooking a spacious garden, originally designed by a star architect for his own home. Mr Park (Lee Sun-kyun) is the super-rich CEO of a global tech firm, always polite, leaving his domestic arrangements to his young and beautiful wife Yeon-kyo (the captivating Cho Yeo-jeong).
For all their wealth, though, she’s a gullible innocent and Ki-woo has soon conned his way into the job of tutoring their impressionable daughter Da-hye (Jung Ziso). Yeon-kyo tells him that their out-of-control little boy Da-song is an artistic genius but none of his tutors has ever lasted more than a month — and Ki-woo spots another opportunity, recommending to her a much sought-after art therapist “Jessica”, in other words his own sister, inventively riding her luck too. And there are still his mother and father to infiltrate into the house and find imposter jobs for as well, completing the parasite invasion, until it all begins to unravel into violence…
Parasite is just terrifically bold filmmaking in so many ways. Like Bong’s previous work, it freely overrides any genre categorisation, now seeming social realism, now almost Brian Rix-style farce, then thriller, then horror or fantasy, without ever being confined by any of them.
It is gloriously bold, too, in its physical enactment of the theme of distance between upper and lower classes, making the poor actually subterranean, dark and confined, swamped with filth, while the rich rise above them into light, space, and beauty. A good deal of the film actually takes place on the different levels, on the many winding steps, between these worlds and, simple recourse though it may be, this staging is tremendously effective, enacted with such freedom and vigour.
Then again the film is beautifully balanced, not just in the casting of the two families and the realisation of their homes, but in the sympathies it evokes. Insulated and privileged though they are, and broadly satirised, the Parks are not monsters but positively kind, victims in their own way of the increasing polarisation of society, creating distances only to be traversed now through such master-servant relationships, in calamitous collision.
Perhaps it actually helps in universalising its meaning that it doesn’t have specific class references for Western viewers? Sad to say, it’s difficult to imagine a film with anything like this purposefulness, relevance, energy and impact being made in this country at the moment. Yet it has so much to show us.
