Until Nothing Is Left - Parasite
Nothing is more prevalent at the movies these days than the message movie. Whether it is art house horror or a Disney sequel, everything seems interested in commenting on our times. How successful films are at doing this varies, but one thing is constant—the more successful the messaging, the more the effort shows. At best, you can always see the seams, and at worst, you can see the loose threads.
The rare exception to this is when a true master is at work and is in full command of the message. Eye on the ball, objective in sight and letting each scene contribute to a compendium of refined strokes. That Parasite manages to be so well-crafted, while also being wildly entertaining is one of the most special feats in recent movie history.
*Parasite is a film where the less you know, the better, so if you haven’t seen it, I would stop here and fix that immediately.
Like many of Bong Joon-Ho’s (The Host, Snowpiercer) films, Parasite is concerned with structural inequality and the societal norms that undergird class systems. The Kims are a tight knit family who live in a basement apartment with minimal resources. One day, the son, Ki-woo (played by Choi Woo-shik) is given the opportunity to work for a wealthy family as a tutor. Seeing opportunities for each of his family members to take on roles with the Parks, he starts to manipulate events to unseat their current staff.
Once each of the Kims have a job, hilarity ensues. The Parks leave for a camping trip and the Kims spend a night in their house. The ensuing chaos is at once unpredictable and the single best sequence of events you will see on a screen this year.
Bong’s creation is at once timeless and modern; macabre and uplifting; brash and gentle. There are any number of threads you can focus on if you are so inclined, but the film’s real strength is in the totality of its narrative. Nothing is left to chance. Its thematic elements are buttressed by its immaculately constructed sets, which are propelled by an enthralling cast, which is guided by able direction. It is all here.
There is a scene where the Kims are reveling in their collective triumph—drinking the Parks’ alcohol and lounging on their furniture. It is perhaps the clearest crystallization of the movie’s core tenets. When we meet the Kims, they are folding pizza boxes, trapped in the banal labor of the gig economy. Now, they are employed in more “respectable” positions, but this one night only spin in the lap of luxury is all they are afforded. True wealth, and thus true freedom, were never really options for them as so much of their virtual caste system comes down to luck and opportunities.
The title refers to the way the Kim family leeches off the Park family to survive. However, the Kim family could just as easily see the Parks in that same vain—leeching off the labor of the less fortunate, with no regard for the fact that they have nothing left. The film intricately places them inside this economic snow globe that none of them really created, and none of them will ever escape. This below that, that above this, and all below American. It is a meta-commentary on how even something as pervasive as wealth doesn’t tell the whole story with regard to the ways we divide ourselves. There is always more. The movie reminds us that even the Parks are not immune to this.
The futility of life within a capitalistic system is nothing new on the big screen, but there is something special about how Bong does it. Like watching someone solve a Rubik’s Cube when they know exactly how to. There was nothing left for him to figure out. He just had to get it onto the screen.
Every scene is a spectacle aimed at presenting a vision of South Korea, and in many ways, the world. It is not all that interested in changing your mind about anything—just kicking your mind across the room and putting it back in your head upside down. For his part, Bong has created an optical illusion of a film; capturing the populist zeitgeist with a movie that is so entertaining it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the message is in every spoonful.
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