Parasite, a furious and masterful political fable (review)
The 2020 Oscar for best film returns to Arte… and confirms Bon Joon-ho’s status as a revered filmmaker!
This Wednesday evening Arte will offer the essential film of Bong Joon-ho : Parasite.
Here is our review of the big winner of the 2019 Palme d’ora few days after the closing of the 79th edition of the festival.
Bong Joon-ho: “No Harvey Weinstein or Netflix this time!”
Bong Joon-ho loves mixtures and impurity. For more than twenty years, he has been digging through the trash of his country to package them into angry, punk and exciting films. Memories of Murder, intertwined the thriller and the rural chronicle by recounting the pursuit of a serial killer by a gang of dismayed country cops. The Host was a monster movie that included political satire, family melodrama, eco-warrior tract and comedy. Mother? A family drama constructed like a mille-feuille with a layer of filial melodrama, another of social metaphor and a psychoanalytic parable as icing.
Different genres and tones but each time the same pattern. From the observation of trivial human dramas, Bong Joon-ho constructs explosive fictions that escape the norm. He reinvests genres to better dissolve them, crush them, and bring forth in their place a grandiose and grotesque object, Kafkaesque and terrifying, kneading ingredients and references that are a priori incompatible. After this crazy trifecta, Bong tried his luck in the English language with Le Transperceneige and Okja, two international blockbusters where his firepower was diluted a little. Parasite therefore appears first of all as a return to its sources: to Korea and its dialectical and literal critique of the “Korean Dream”. Like Memories of Murder, The Host and Mother Parasite hunts down monsters who thrive on amnesia from years of dictatorship, corruption and destructive capitalism.
That’s the joke of the festival: you shouldn’t reveal the motives of the films you see. We will therefore not say too much about the plot of the film which involves multiple twists and turns and of which, it must be admitted, part of the pleasure lies precisely in the effects of surprise. But let’s set the scene. Parasite begins in the manner of Awful, Dirty and Mean, with the description of a prole tribe. Ki-Taek, his wife, his son and his daughter form a united, but poor, family. They live in a basement apartment that looks like a cesspool. The drunks pee on their windows, their toilets explode and pour the fleet of sewers into the living room… hell. They try as best they can to make ends meet and get by through shabby schemes (folding pizza boxes to earn a little money). One day, a friend of Ki-Woo’s son offers him a well-paid job: to be an English teacher for a rich man’s daughter. Ki-Woo accepts and then activates a mechanism that will bring the family out of their hole and propel them into a vortex of luxury and crazy violence. By inviting themselves to the homes of the rich, Ki-Taek and his family will cause chaos, transforming resentment and the feeling of injustice into furious and vital energy. The entire film is therefore organized around these crabs who will overthrow the social order. But are these really the parasites of the title? Didn’t Bong rather target the privileged? Or, the title being in the singular, was he not thinking more of a last-minute surprise guest?
As in his previous films, Bong therefore has fun with genres, taking up the codes of home invasion, constructing a imitation heist film (with recruitment of members and implementation of an infallible plan) and creating a farce where the family’s bickering becomes the source of comedy scenes in a film which is basically as funny as it is disturbing. Because, despite the devastating humor at the beginning, Parasite quickly becomes a suspense film where tragedy competes with buffoonery: when fate falls on this dream house the film veers towards metaphysics and Kafkaesque absurdity. All of this is, as always with the filmmaker, put together with furious mastery: the slow tracking shots in the house, the icy and lush photography, the subtle play of the actors between agitation and daze, the scathing efficiency of the frames and the almost theatrical structure of the dramaturgy make this Parasite a jubilant work at the same time as a formidable critical instrument. Bong Joon-ho describes a world (ours) which, deprived of a credible political ideal and any moral vision of human relationships, returns to the savagery from which it had painfully thought it would extricate itself and locks itself in a spiral from which we will only emerge amputated. The analysis of the flaws of capitalism and the alienating power of money innervates an epic with virtuoso jolts. It deserves at least a directing award, Alejandro. A Palm, even?
Go behind the scenes of Parasite dubbing
