Review: It’s Hard to Not Be Romantic About Cinema With Something Like ‘Parasite’
Saturday night. A packed theater hall. A screening of Parasite. The atmosphere, electric. The hype, overwhelming. Our expectations, lofty. Rarely do such conditions converge for a theatrical experience like this where you and the hundreds of people around you are all eagerly anticipating what may very well be the best film of year.
Since its debut and victory at this year’s Cannes, Bong Joon-ho’s latest has been dangled in front of us with tantalizing promise. Each subsequent wave of release has seen increasingly hyperbolic rhetoric, and each time the film has mounted greater and greater forward momentum. With multiple sold out shows upon release in New York, it came as a pleasant surprise that Seattle’s 570 seat Egyptian theater also sold out, converting one of the city’s best venues into one giant Bong Hive. When showtime rolled around, the lights dimmed and together we watched Parasite, collectively hoping everything we heard would come true. And it did.
Parasite is such a force of nature that you know right away how special it is. On so many levels this is a film that achieves the highest standards of the medium. It is poignant commentary on class division and wealth inequality. It is a tightly woven thriller that mercilessly plays with the audience. And it’s a comedy with the firmest pulse on tone. Laughs, gasps, and tears all rolled into this one immaculate package, and yet it’s still not enough to adequately describe all that is right with Parasite. The easiest way to put it: the film is a stone colder killer, and it is Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece.
The Kim family is struggling. Making ends meet by taking on tasks in the gig economy, they live on the margins of society with the hopes of raising themselves out of poverty. One day, a friend offers the son a temporary position as a tutor to the uber rich Park family. Hastily accepting, the son enters their home, earns their trust, and one by one brings his family onto the payroll of the Parks under false pretenses.
Parasite is easily one of the year’s best films which is all the justification you need to see a film like this. Almost inherent to this particular experience is a requisite blind watch, and while there’s nothing below that will ruin your experience, I wouldn’t blame you if you stopped reading right here if only you got up and went to the theater to see it. But if you’ve decided to keep reading, let me sing from on high the wonders of Parasite.
There is an effortless precision with which Bong traverses this script. Working across three different genres and modulating between them all, Parasite is a tonal balancing act that is recently comparable to Ready or Not, but a key distinction is the task here is woefully more challenging. Part comedy, part drama, and part thriller, it’s remarkable to see it all of it congeal into something so adept on all fronts. The genre mixing of Bong’s past rears its head with devilish effectiveness, so much so that you wonder what kind of deal he struck with the devil to get here. The front end plays up much of the humor. You laugh at jokes between classes, and often at them, but the script then mixes in thriller elements, followed by weighty dramatic themes, and all of a sudden you have a balanced cocktail of cinema’s finest elements that you can’t get enough of.
Separating the Parks and the Kims is rigid class division. As the Parks live inside a plush modernist palace atop the social strata, the Kims are cramped inside a subterranean apartment in the city slums. We are given two families — one father, one mother, one daughter, and one son— of mirrored appearance, living two distinct lives. A line between the haves and have-nots in Korea’s economic climate is clearly drawn, and when the Kims infiltrate the family circle, the two mirrored images start to merge, and the distain the rich have for the poor becomes more and more pronounced to them.
The way the Parks live in grotesque excess while the Kims barely keep their heads above water is just the surface of this comparison. It’s the little things that really break your heart, and Bong serves it up not with a hammer, but a feather. Where something like Joker — a film I regretfully bring up in same proximity to Parasite — berates you with cruelty, Bong alternatively shows how the most subtle of infractions, words, and acts generate psychological reactions that do more harm than anything physical.
The film willfully acknowledges its own metaphors, but to no less effect towards its overall objectives. In part because of its comedic angle, but also because its doing so with something to say. The separation of rich and poor is given a physical metaphor associated with ascent and descent, and the spaces both the Kims and Parks occupy are laden with subtext that give rise to thematic mise-en-scene. Throughout though is the idea that society is engineered with people at the top and people at the bottom, and as Bong painfully brings up, those at the bottom will be trapped with no way out, a bitter notion to think about, but one that rings true and gives Parasite its bite.
In Bennet Miller’s Moneyball, Brad Pitt says, “How can you not be romantic about baseball?,” an all encompassing line spoken to encapsulate the sentimental narratives that arise from the sport. Since then, I’ve often thought the same thing about cinema. That night at the theater as we all filed out, you could feel the collective experience. Not something that comes alone at your computer screen, nor the run of the mill studio affair, but rather something that comes on rare occasion. It really felt like a reaffirmation of why we all love cinema: to come together and be moved by situations unlike our own so that we can empathize with those around us. And after seeing something like Parasite, all I can say is, “How can you not be romantic about cinema?”
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