PARASITE (2019)

PARASITE (DIR: BONG JOON HO) (SCR: HO AND JIN WON HAN)

The ratings may have been low for this year's Academy Award telecast, but that didn't mean that there weren't any surprises.  I won't lie, when Bong Joon Ho's South Korean thriller PARASITE was announced as the Best Picture, I jumped to my feet in surprise.  Even though the film had already won three Oscars (for Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best International Film), I just couldn't believe that the Academy had, for the first time ever, awarded a foreign film the Best Picture award.  Now a cynic may point out that this could just be an example of Hollywood courting the foreign film market at a time when  international box office is getting more and more important to their bottom line, and it does raise the question of why the Academy has waited so long to award a foreign film when there have been so many great foreign films made over the years. Surely,  filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini have made movies that were the best of the year they were released.  Despite all of that, I think PARASITE won simply because it was indeed, the best film of last year.  It's an exciting, darkly funny and wildly violent movie with some raw social satire mixed in as well. 
Director Bong Joon Ho has actually been pretty well known in the American market since his entertaining monster movie THE HOST came out in 2006.  Since then he has also made another excellent thriller (2009's MOTHER) and two oddball science fiction films (2013's  SNOWPIERCER and 2017's OKJA).  Ho first came up with the idea for PARASITE while working on SNOWPIERCER when it was originally imagined as a play.  He based the story partly on his own experiences as a struggling young student tutoring for a rich family back in the '90's ("Every week I would go into their house, and I thought how fun it would be if I could get all my friends to infiltrate the house one by one." He told Atlantic magazine).  The script that Ho and his co screenwriter Jin Won Han completed was also influenced by Kim Ki-young's 1960 Korean film THE HOUSEMAID and the true story of Christine and Léa Papin—two live-in maids who murdered their employers in 1930s France.  Because the beautiful home that the poor family infiltrates is so crucial to the film, the entire building was created in striking looking sets in different locations.   The poor family's basement dwelling was also built on sets, with production designer Lee Ha-jun visiting towns and villages in South Korea that had been abandoned and were about to be torn down to get a feel for the set design.  Shot in a hundred and twenty four days mostly in the city of Seoul on a budget of around eleven million dollars, PARASITE has become a world wide hit.  Along with grossing around forty three millions in the US (a very high amount for a foreign language film), it has made over two hundred million world wide.

Kang-ho Song

It's plot concerns a family of four, father Ki-taek (Kang-ho Song), wife  Park Chung-sook(Jang Hye-jin), young adult daughter Kim Ki-jung(Park So-dam) and near college age teenage son Kim (called Kevin) Ki-woo(Choi Woo-shik) that are just barely surviving in modern day South Korea, squatting in a basement and doing odd jobs.  When a teenage friend of the son offers him a job tutoring the teen daughter of a rich family, he jumps at the chance and secures the job with documents forging a fake education.  Seeing that the family has an artistic young son, Da Song(Jung Hyeon-jun) he introduces his sister as his educated cousin and art therapist, and she too is soon hired.  Then the family manipulates the family's chauffeur (Park Keun-rok) and maid  (Lee Jung-eun), getting them fired and replacing them with the father and mother.  But one night when the wealthy family is gone and the whole family is relaxing and enjoying their new social status , the maid returns and reveals that her husband Oh Geun-sae (Park Myung-hoon) has been hiding in a secret bomb shelter in the basement of the house to avoid paying his debts.  She begs them to let him stay and give him food, but they refuse.  A physical confrontation ensues, which gets even more tense with the unexpected early return of the wealthy family.  The four of them manage to lock the maid and her husband in the cellar for the night and avoid being found by the family.  The next day there is a birthday party for  Da Song.  When Keven tries to let the maid and her husband loose, he finds her dead and the husband crazed.  After knocking  Keven unconscious, he wildly stabs Kim during the party.  In the ensuing chaos, Da Song appears to have a seizure, and his father begs Ki Taek to drive him to the hospital.  In a fit of rage, Kit Taek stabs his employer and hides in the basement.  Later, Kevin recovers from his injuries and discovers where his father is hiding.  He dreams of buying the house and releasing his father.

First of all, this is a great movie to rewatch: the first time I saw I responded mostly to the thriller elements, as I found myself wondering if the trickster family would get away with their scam.  And then, when everything seems to be going their way, the return of the family's maid set the movie going in a completely different direction.  In a world of predictable movie formulas, there's nothing I love more in a film than a story that moves in unexpected (but plausible) ways, so from the moment that the maid revealed her husband's hiding place I was hooked!  Ho has mentioned that Martin Scorsese is one of his directorial influences, but I found myself thinking of Alfred Hitchcock in the way that Ho builds suspense out of the simplest thing, like hiding under a table or walking down  a long, narrow staircase without knowing what lies below.   And the chaos of the climatic birthday scene is perfectly handled, with characters making sudden, shockingly violent choices that make sense upon reflection.  While the script sometimes can be heavy handed (the symbolism of the philosopher's stone, which brings the poor family both good and back luck, is a bit obvious, especially since Kevin refers to it as a metaphor!), and the fact that we don't know for sure if little Da Song dies at the end or not seems like a flaw (it could go either way), it's mostly perfect in both story and character.
On my subsequent viewings of the film, I was able to focus more on the more subtle elements of it:  I love the way that director Ho and cinematographer Kyung-pyo Hong keep the camera sleekly panning in the enormous house, often to reveal people hiding or spying.  Or the way that Kim's first visit to the wealthy household is shot likes he's entering paradise (for him, he is).  The house itself, with it's enormous window view and sleek modern look, is a triumph of production design.  Even the location of the basement door and the secret door beneath it is in the right place, becoming a constant reminder to the trickster family once they know what lies behind it.  I also love the clever wit in the way that Kim rehearses her fake story to herself before meeting the family, and then correctly guesses just what to say to impress the mother while "analyzing" her son's art. 
All of the performances are great: I especially enjoy Kang-ho Song (who's a big star in Korea, and has worked with director Ho several times now, stretching back to 2003's MEMORIES OF MURDER) as the father Ki-taek.  On my first viewing of the film, I found his act of violence at the end shocking, but upon repeat viewings I can see the anger and resentment simmering up under his usually taciturn demeanor.  And the moment where he almost seems mad enough to strike his wife, and then laughs it off is chilling, because we never know just how much he's joking.  As great as he is, my favorite performance in the movie is given by Jeong-eun Lee (who has also worked with director Ho before)  as the ill fated maid Moon-gwang.  At first, her character just seems like a prim and proper housekeeper, but then she becomes sad and  pathetic as she begs the family to let her husband stay.  Only moments later she becomes wrathful when she briefly  has the upper hand on them, almost transforming on screen .  She even gets some nice romantic flashback moments with her simple minded husband.  This is a wide range of complex emotions that Lee nails perfectly, and she's only a supporting character!

Jeong-eun Lee

So, excellent suspense, dark humor, great plot twists and wonderful performances throughout are part of this film's greatness.  But it also works on another level; biting class commentary.  From the opulent home of the wealthy family to the pathetic, crowded basement that the poor family is squatting in, the contrast between the rich in the poor in not only South Korea but also the rest of the world is always present in the film.  Importantly, we at first on the side of poor family as we see the terrible conditions they live in and menial work they have to do.  But as their plan progresses it's gets harder to defend the way they set up the innocent servants to get fired, although we can enjoy their ingenuity as they manipulate the family into hiring them(squirting chili sauce on a napkin at just the right moment is a brilliant detail!).  And we can't help but be on their side when they briefly enjoy their ill gotten gains by kicking their feet up and dreaming about actually owning a such a house  while the rich family are all on vacation. The real breaking point comes when Moon-gwang reveals her husband, and they refuse to feed him and let him stay, even though it wouldn't be hard for them.  So here we have an poor family that has moved up in the world refusing to help out someone who is in the same position they once were, a bleak look at how poor people moving into the middle class often ignore their roots.  Even more interesting is the fact that the rich family are not bad people, but then they have the luxury of being able to afford kindness ("They are rich but still nice."  Ki-taek tells his wife. "They are nice because they are rich." She replies).  Class is shown as such a defining factor with these people that even the literal stench of poverty that hangs over Ki-taek can't be washed off, and it leads to a defining moment when a reminder of his scent causes him to lash out at his employer, killing him.  Yes, wealth dispartiy is a tricky issue in this film, and even the title can be seen as having a double meaning, in which both the poor and the rich leech off of each other.

SO DID THE ACADEMY GET IT RIGHT?

Ok, it's pretty obvious that I love this movie and agree with the Academy's choice.  I personally didn't think that 2019 was a particularly great year for American movies, with only Noah Baumbach's well acted drama MARRIAGE STORY reaching greatness, in my opinion.  In fact, I think the only other movies that could compare with PARASITE are all from other countries, like Pedro Almodovar's excellent PAIN & GLORY, or Céline Sciamma's PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE.  And while both of those films are good, I don't think that they top PARASITE, which was not only a groundbreaking choice, but the right one.