by Lynn Lee
For a 132-minute Korean film that isn’t yet in wide release, Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite is already one of the most talked-about movies of the season, and for good reason. Alas, most of the reasons can’t really be discussed without major spoilers – but that’s all the more incentive to see it as soon as it hits a theater near you.
When I saw it, I loved it, which I wasn’t necessarily expecting considering I hadn’t been a fan of either The Host or Snowpiercer, arguably the director's most popular films. Despite its run time, Parasite is tighter than those films, and its tonal shifts and genre-melding smoother. It's also more focused, its treatment of one of Bong’s favorite themes – class disparities – razor-sharp yet also oddly compassionate, ultimately condemning the system rather than any individual players.
Parasite, which took the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, also felt to me like the deranged evil twin of last year’s Palme d’Or winner, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters...
[Warning: SPOILERS]
the garden party
I’m not the first to observe that both movies center on a poor urban family clinging to the fringes of society who get by through scheming and conning (and in Shoplifters’ case, actually stealing) – because “honest” work doesn’t pay enough to keep them even at subsistence level. Both movies also humanize the grifters by showing their close family bonds and loyalty to one another. And both pull the rug out from under the audience, although in very different ways. I would argue that Shoplifters’ big twist and eventual consequences are more quietly devastating, if less sensational, than Parasite’s. Where Parasite explodes, all of its bottled-up class fury directed up and outward in that climactic garden party-turned-horror movie sequence, Shoplifters implodes, as the fragile, idealized fiction constructed by this makeshift “family” collapses, not from without but from within, triggered by betrayals that undermine our faith in those bonds.
In fact, the more I thought about Parasite, the less I was reminded of Shoplifters and the more similarity I saw to another film that got a lot of buzz at Cannes last year despite not winning anything: Lee Chang-Dong’s Burning, which took a spare, enigmatic short story by Haruki Murakami and expanded it into a broader, though still enigmatic parable of class and desire. Like Parasite, Burning gradually stokes the embers of class resentment, as the protagonist moves from marveling at the casual privilege and sophistication of his much-richer counterpart to unspoken jealousy at the yawning gulf between them to, finally, homicidal rage triggered by the counterpart’s expression of contempt towards the lower-class people he clearly regards as disposable. There’s a double echo of that rage in Parasite, in the parallel-track subplot of the couple that’s on an even lower societal rung than the protagonists—an added dimension you don’t see that often in movies about class conflict.
Which leads me to wonder if it’s just a coincidence that three of the most incisive films about class and income inequality in the past couple of years have come out of East Asia rather than the West. Although Bong has cited The Big Short (and, interestingly, Only Lovers Left Alive) as part of his inspiration for Parasite, neither of those movies (both of which I liked) probe inter-class dynamics anywhere near as astutely as either Parasite or Burning. Last year’s Sorry to Bother You had a go at it that was interesting but didn't come completely together—I think partly because as with so many American movies, the question of class is often hard to separate from the even more complicated issue of race, and it’s even harder to address their intersection coherently.
Parasite's "upstairs/downstairs" families in character posters
Meanwhile, over in the UK, possibly the most class-obsessed nation in the world, someone like Ken Loach tends to be perceived - fairly or not - as cinematic medicine, to be passed over in favor of the upstairs-downstairs fairy tale of Downton Abbey. The genius of a movie like Parasite is that it dismembers that fairy tale in a way that manages to be just as entertaining, if significantly less comforting, than anything ever dreamed up by Sir Julian Fellowes.
All of which is to say, tell all your friends who loved Downton Abbey to see Parasite, stat - and when they get over the shock, to follow up with Shoplifters and Burning. They'll thank you for it later, I promise.