Parasite

2019, d. Bong Joon-Ho

Back in November 2006 I was with the wife (who was not yet then my wife) in London, England when we decided to get off our feet and take in a movie.  Looking through the listings I saw that there was a giant monster movie that had been generating great buzz on the nerd sites I was viewing back then, a film called The Host by Bong Joon-Ho.  I loved the experience of movies in London (times were listed with two times, the time when the commercials and previews started and the actual start time of the movie) and I loved the movie.  It was just an incredible film which I have been meaning to both add to the shelf and revisit ever since.  Of course, Bong Joon-Ho's name cemented in my brain immediately and his films have become must-see pictures. 

Like many modern auteurs (eg. Quentin Tarantino, Yorgos Lanthanamos, Guillermo Del Toro, Jordan Peele), Director Bong speaks the language of cinema.  He's able to take genre and turn it into something beyond genre.  His craft in filmmaking is taking the languages of others and making it work in his own vision.  Influences are not obscured but they concede to his will.  Each frame of Director Bong captures seems meticulously constructed, from set design, to composition, to movement within the frame.  Where both Snowpiercer and Okja's frames seemed maybe a little overbusied, Parasite is a master in full control and negotiating perfectly his restraint. 

Parasite isn't a genre picture, but it's nerdy as all hell in its own way and worth obsessing over.  It's the story of the downtrodden Kim family, happy together but struggling to get by, as they start to integrate themselves into the household of the upper-class Park family through an increasingly sketchier series of lies and deceits.  The Kim family are not thieves, they're not violent or dangerous, but they are desperate to work and afford to live.  Maintaining the lie with their employers doesn't seem at all hard for any of them, they genuinely seem good at their work, likeable and are liked.  They weave their earnest grift with admirable aplomb. But one lie did some damage and it starts to return upon them, and then spirals out of control in both a comic and horrific fashion. 

How this all plays out, from start to finish, is a masterclass in storytelling.  It's both intensely dramatic, but also pulpy.  It's fun and funny, but also so heavy.  There's a surface level glee to seeing the rich get grifted so easily, but the reality underlying the story is one of class divides which takes on more and more weight.  The "parasite" of the title represents the one family that's feeding off the other family, and at first it seems like the Kims are the parasite, but as we move on, to see the reliance that the Parks have on their employees, it's even clearer that it's the other way around.  A parasite can happily move on to a new host, and the more advanced parasite can do so easily, without any further consideration, as the Parks do here.

The fact that Parasite took home both Best Motion Picture and Best Director at the last Academy Awards is only shocking in that the Academy has historically had a hard time granting a foreign language picture its big accolades.  But there's no doubt that Parasite was the best picture of last year.  It's somehow a poignant drama, social commentary and massively entertaining with sets so iconic they've become tremendously popular background images for people to use on Zoom calls during the COVID pandemic, and even prior to its academy win HBO was looking to Director Bong to expand upon the story for a mini-series or ongoing series.

My only disappointment is in myself for not seeing it in the theatre, as I had intended.