I already loved Director Bong Joon-ho since Snowpiercer, and love him more on Memories of Murder. So when I read he won Palme d’Or at Cannes for his latest release of Parasite, I couldn’t be more excited. Director Bong always makes a well-crafted movie, so his win on Cannes is actually not quite surprising. Instead, Parasite is more than just any well-crafted movie.
The most important, yet interesting, thing about Parasite is that this movie didn’t lie on metaphors. Director Bong pictures his characters as the common people on society, and how that people can react to such social differences that separate the wealthy and the poor. This is a very common social construct in our society, but his clever tricks to deliver the story from one twist to another are in another level. All familiar things in Parasite remind us how likely this household to our daily life, and it made the story becomes eerily possible to happen to all of us. Like Director Bong’s other movies, the storyline of Parasite is so well-crafted that it becomes holistic and picture-perfect at the end.
Parasite centers around Kim family who live in their basement-level apartment, who cannot even afford their own wi-fi. Their needs of internet are fulfilled by their neighbor’s wi-fi, which now have password and they need to find another free wi-fi. Their life begin to change after the eldest son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) received the offer of teaching his friend’s teenage student, Park Da-hye (Jung Ji-so). Ki-woo soon realized that Park is a wealthy family, and he tries to make his sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam) employed in that family as well. Their leeches nature soon developed with Ki-woo and Ki-jung try their best to deceive the innocent Mrs. Park (Cho Yeo-jeong) to fire her chauffeur and her housekeeper in order to make their parents, Ki-taek (the brilliant Song Kang-ho) and Chong-sook (Jang Hye-jin), are employed in Park’s house.
As well as other characters in Director Bong’s movies, these members in Kim family are smart and resourceful. The main problem is that they’ve been screwed by the system that doesn’t have any mercy for those who are poor, and this is the main theme of this movie. The first half of the movie is funny, until the twists come over another twist and you cannot feel anything but pity them, both Kim family and Park family. If Snowpiercer divided society into hierarchical level, Parasite stacked up that society from up in the sky to the bottom of the basement. The twists are all surprising, but they are not the main interest of this movie. The main interest is how that different stacks of society meet in one world, and how the world of the top and the bottom people in financial pyramid stumbled into one.
The other interesting thing is how Director Bong joins that funny and giddy moment until the audiences never imagine that the movie is moving to a different direction. The story went smoothly and it never changed its emphasize on what they should tell us. This is the movie where all story parts are so well-constructed that even the most twisted twist can be served well on the same wooden table we see right from the very start. This is no superhero movie where you can divide the good and evil characters. This is the movie where all characters are natural humans like us, who have good and evil inside them, who are victims to the system that put people in different level just because their financial ability.
The last part of the movie made Parasite becomes the angriest Director Bong’s movie to date. This is where he addressed his madness over nowadays society, as well as his vulnerability about the system we are all in. The ending is devastating, of course, and it clarifies of how much we dream about that peaceful co-existence, the more devastating it is when everything turns out wrong.
This is why you should watch Parasite. It’s not how clever the twists are, but how clever Director Bong put this movie as a social critic to nowadays society. No wonder this movie won Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Original Title: 기생충 | Directed by: Bong Joon-ho | Produced by: Bong Joon-ho, Kwak Sin-ae, Jang Young-hwan | Written by: Bong Joon-ho, Han Jin-won | Starring: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam | Music by: Jung Jae-il | Cinematography: Hong Kyung-pyo | Edited by: Yang Jin-mo | Production Company: Barunson E&A Corp. | Distributed by: CJ Entertainment
9.8/10
The Lady in Pink 