Film Review: "Parasite" ****
Bong Joon Ho is one of the best directors at work today. Through his satire of a monster film, The Host, his psychological thriller, Mother, his science fiction film, Snowpiercer, and his fantasy, Okja, Joon Ho has demonstrated that he is a master of genre films. Each of his movies played with the elements of the genre, combining them with a biting sense of humor. They showed a young exuberance similar to Tarantino or James Cameron’s earlier films, where a love of cinema imbues itself into every frame of the film as they both play with and against the genre’s conventions. With his latest film, Parasite, Bong Joon Ho has created his most mature film to date and his most subtle. That doesn’t mean he has lost his signature sense of humor, nor his Tarantino-esque use of violence, but it builds with a slow bubble rather than a stylistic hammer.
Living in squalor, but at least living together, the Kim family struggles to survive without employment. The father, Kim Ki-taek (a brilliant Kang-ho Song), used to have a job, but even with that, the family lives poor. Their apartment, if it can be called that, is at the bottom of a series of poor apartments, a place for the drunk to use their doorstep as a restroom. In the apartment, the bathroom toilet seat almost butts against the ceiling. In a moment of extreme symbolic importance, the family is working together to fold pizza boxes for a local pizza place when an exterminator on the street begins spraying toxic pesticides everywhere. Ki-taek tells his family to leave the window open. Since they have an infestation of stink bugs, they will get a free extermination. They sit in their apartment coughing through the fumes trying to continue to put together pizza boxes through the cloud of pesticide. When they demand their pay from the young woman who comes for the boxes, the family crowds around her, again working together; some of the boxes are not folded correctly… after all, they could not see or breathe while doing their work.
Soon the family is saved when a college age friend of the son, Kim Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi), stops by before he leaves for a year abroad. Min, the college age friend, brings a gift of a mountain rock to symbolize stability for the Kim family. He also offers his friend Ki-woo a job. Min has been tutoring a high-school age daughter, Park Da-hye (Ji-so Jung), of the famous Park family. Min is in love with her and has chosen Ki-woo to take his place as her English tutor because… he believes that the poor Ki-woo couldn’t possibly seduce Da-hye. It is the first example of many to come of the rich completely underestimating the poor.
Ki-woo gets the job and inundates himself into the Park family before suggesting that he knows a young woman who could be a perfect art tutor for the family’s young son, Park Da-song. Da-song is a rebellious little kid who loves to dress up and play Indians. He saw a ghost when he was in first grade and now suffers from PTSD and seizures. Ki-woo lies about the identity of the art teacher and convinces the family to hire this art teacher, who is actually his sister, Kim Ki-jung (So-dam Park). It won’t be very long until the entire Kim family has been hired by the Parks. Although the Parks do not realize any of them are related. The Kim’s employment come at the cost of the Parks current employees. The Kims demonstrate through their ingenuity and charisma and a little foul play their intelligence and desire to be together as a family.
Slowly, ever so slowly, Bong Joon-ho begins to layer in the images for the audience to understand his satire. It would be easy to look at the rich Park family as innocent, duped by the insidious poor, but, that is not what the film language suggests. The Kim family are almost always shot together. They stand as a family. Even when the Ki-woo begins to make money, he feeds his parents. Even though the father is not paying for the food, he takes his own and piles it on his son’s plate, telling him that he must eat well and stay strong. They work together. Contrast this with the Parks.
The rich family lives in isolation at the top of a street, perfectly juxtaposed to the crowded Kim apartment at the bottom of the city. Yes, the Park’s house is beautiful, modern, full of space and light. Yet, it is also cold. It does not feel lived in. The Parks are rarely in the same frame. Even when they occupy the same room, which is actually not that common, they are separated by the individual shots. Whether it is the mother sitting outside at her own table, or the daughter watching through her window, the Parks tend to watch each other, but not interact.
This feeling of the grotesque reality of the rich continues to grow with their infantilization. No one in the family seems to be able to do anything by themselves. Both the children need tutors. The mother does not appear to able to do anything to raise her own children let alone clean or cook. The patriarch of the house, Park Dong-ik (Sun-Kyun Lee) rules his family with a cold hand. He cannot bring himself to say he loves his wife. He said it can be called love. But at the same time, while he complains about the help, he requires his wife to do all of the hiring and firing. He worries about those who cross the line with him, an unforgivable offense and is also offended by any off-putting odor. Using the smell in an ingenious manner, Bong Joon Ho connects the poor family to the stink bugs that are exterminated in the beginning of the film. There comes a moment when Dong-ik, being so infantile, screams at Kim Ki-teak that he must drive during an emergency, showing how much they rely on the poor to do everything for them.
The Kim family for all their lies and schemes are a loving family. They are presented in a wonderfully realistic manner. Their joy flies high while they finally have gainful employment again. Perhaps never more so then when they move into the Parks’ house while the Parks go on a camping trip. But then, a storm comes, both literally and figuratively. The night of the storm shocking truths are revealed and Bong Joon Ho digs a depth in what he is doing, transforming his situational comedy into horrific social commentary. As the rain pours down, the Park’s youngest child, takes a teepee outside and sets it up to camp in their yard. The teepee holds up against the storm, not allowing him to get wet. While that is happening, the Kim home is flooding with sewage. The family tries to save what they can, wading into the shoulder high sewage, with an extraordinary image of Ki-jung, sitting on the toilet, near the ceiling, sewage pumping out of the toilet and into the water around while she smokes a cigarette. The juxtaposition of the poor whose lives are ruined by the storm with the rich who are not really touched by it is one of the many poignant and subtle visuals of the film.
While that is disgusting, perhaps the worst truth revealed is that the poor worship the rich. Every day when Mr. Park comes home, the lights light up for him. To do this, someone offers a prayer and thanks to him and lights them. Kim Ki-teak tells his family how nice the Parks are to them, and he believes it, reminds them that they must be grateful to the Parks for all they do… even when they hold their nose and ignore them. This is when we realize that the Parasites of the title of the film are not the Kims… but are actually the Parks.
