The Oscar-winning production has poured salt into the wound that aches in the world.
When I went to the movies to see Parasite it had already won an Oscar for best film and had been recommended by people close to me. The only thing I had heard about it was that it explored the theme of social inequality, so I had little information to let myself be surprised by whatever had struck the public opinion.
I loved that the film stuck with its Korean essence, from the language to the depiction of daily life in Seoul. The director Bong Joon-Ho has shared in some interviews how the idea for this movie came to life, mainly from hearing the stories of how people lived in low-income households and the challenges they had to face. The story had been inside his head for a while and continues developing the class struggle from his previous production Snowpiercer.
Different mirrors of social inequality
From the beginning, we are introduced into the home of the Kim's. A low income family in South Korea, two parents, a son and a daughter whose greatest relief comes from obtaining a free Wi-Fi signal by holding their phones up high across their bathroom.
In contrast with how Snowpiercer depicted a horizontal delimitation of the different classes in train wagons; in Parasite we see a vertical representation of social inequality, where the poor live in the depths of the abysm, the recognizable semi-basements of Seoul.
The audience gets to be the eyes of the Kim family. They are introduced to how they see the world, peaking from their semi-basement home, partly buried in the earth but at the same time they can observe the outside, that hope of coming afloat and thriving which stays as a promise.
In the surface, the structural distinction seems simple says Bong Joon-Ho, but as we advance in the plot, the picture we are seeing falls apart in many complex layers and this is a focal point of the movie as we later see the structure of the house is directly tied to the unfolding of the narrative.
The tables turn for the Kim family when a chance of luck manages to place one of their members at the service of the Parks, a high-class family, as their daughter's tutor.
Slowly but surely, the entire family makes their way into the service of the rich and well-born, phagocyting the roles they wish they could enjoy. The dream of changing their status and upscaling their living conditions will only remain as a hope, one almost impossible to reach.
Nevertheless, in the meantime we get an uncomfortable sensation when the Kim's start infiltrating one by one the abode of the rich. Everything seems harmless but the rhythm of how the events develop takes us to a radicalization of deceptions and their reactions.
All the ranges from our reality
Bong Joon-Ho has stated how he enjoys portraying characters that are in their ambiguous grey-zones, nor complete villains nor heroes, they are people who have come from the reality surrounding him.
He claims to detach himself from gender conventions and is more interested in exploring the tones that resemble reality, how something that is local to South Korea can be universal at the same time. Even though he claims to only think about himself as the audience, I am sure it is exactly this interest of his what the global public can feel when they are kept posted to their seats.
Parasite could happen anywhere really when you think about it but stays true to the Korean lifestyle and culture, bringing some fresh air into a domain that used to be run exclusively by Americans, the category of best film of the year.
Because the director draws inspiration from his surroundings, he maintains an obsession with the emotion of anxiety and how it can play a role in our lives. The environment one is brought up in exerts certain pressures that can shape our understanding of the world, of what we deem just and unfair.
The contrast between the luscious gardens and immaculate floors of the mansion and the flooded and infested basement of the lowly, bring to our attention just what we can see in everyday life. Even those hidden corners that no one seems to pay attention to but are still there, reminds us of the social inequalities of modern societies and what a vicious circle it is for families that are trapped in the poverty wheel and cannot get off.
As a thriller, Parasite is detail-focused and reproduces the sensations one encounters when faced with the unreachable, from the smells to the tastes of opulence.
Dirty feet crawling, unbearable odors, legal forgeries in order to cross the threshold and gain the trust from the insiders. The strangeness from the lowly will always remain so, it cannot be eliminated as hard as they try, there will always be an obstacle that prevents them from fitting in.
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