Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, the most celebrated film of last year, has finally opened in India. And all the accolades it is receiving are well-deserved indeed. The first of these was Palme d’Or at Cannes, where it premiered. The film — particularly its first act — reminded me of the Palme d’Or winner of the year before, Shoplifters. Both films are about impoverished families employing questionable means to make a living.
While in Kore-eda’s film a group of unconnected people come together and posing as a family, Parasite has members of a family pretend to be unrelated in order to hoodwink their way into the employ of a wealthy family. The tones of the two films, however, are quite disparate. Shoplifters is all tenderness and compassion. Bong, on the other hand, gives us a darkly comic thriller.
This isn’t the only difference. In Shoplifters, Kore-eda trains his empathetic eye at one specific group of people, while Parasite is more about society at large and the inequalities in our world. This isn’t to say that Bong is indifferent to his characters. Nor does he short-change them (Parasite has one of the best ensembles in recent memory, and Bong makes excellent use of them). He is just more objective, and perhaps cynical, in his view of them.
But he does not blame any of them individually for their flaws, nor praise their virtues. They are all products of the system. As Chung-sook, the mother, says of the lady who employs them, “[She is] not ‘rich, but still nice’. Nice because she is rich.” Money, she says, is an iron that smoothes out all the creases in rich people. “I’d be nice too if I had all this money.” The truth of the statement cannot be gainsaid.
There is often a tendency in fiction to make the poor and disadvantaged out to be saints and show them to be more kind, especially to those below them. Ditto for women as opposed to men. Parasite breaks with convention. Kim Ki-taek, the father, is the one who spares a thought for the driver he has replaced. His daughter shuts him up and tells him to focus on them instead. Chung-sook, too, is not very sympathetic to the plight of the housekeeper whose place she has taken.
“Don’t call me sis!” she tells her when the latter tries to appeal for kindness. Even among the downtrodden, there’s a hierarchy. You may be stomped upon but you are standing on someone’s shoulder too. And when you’re at the bottom and want to survive, you can’t be too nice. Should you choose to ignore the social commentary, Parasite will still prove to be a thoroughly satisfying film. Bong’s screenplay is taut, original, and keeps us guessing till the very end. But it’s the layers in it that make Parasite so original. Its incisive look at class conflict, though centred in the milieu of Seoul, applies universally.
Bong lays bare curse of capitalism and the ever-widening gap it breeds between the haves and the have-nots. A rain that completely upends the lives of the poor is counted as a blessing by the rich (“The sky’s so blue and there’s no pollution!”).In such a situation, aspiration to overcome one’s circumstances and lack of privilege and climb higher might seem like the natural response. Particularly to those of us already blessed with privilege. In Parasite, it’s the son, Kim Ki-woo, who has this aspiration.
Though he terms himself a loser, once his friend tells him he can teach 10 times better than college boys, Ki-woo realises this is true. And when he prints out a forged university certificate, he assures his father he will go to that university soon and has only printed out the document a bit early. He’s also the one who starts daydreaming about living in the luxurious house. His sister, Kim Ki-jeong, on the other hand, is much more pragmatic. When he asks her which room she’d want if they lived there, she shoots back, “Get me the house first. Then I’ll think about it.” It might seem cynical, but there’s wisdom in her approach too.
The second act of Parasite ends with a brilliant sequence of the Kim family stealing away from the Park house to their own. They make their way from the wealthy neighbourhood down to the nether regions of the city where they live, quite literally. They have to climb down innumerable stairs to get to their own locality. It serves as a rich reminder of just how wide the gap is and how incredibly difficult their climb up the social ladder will be. The film also gives us a character who has tried to make this climb, only to fall lower in the process. It is easy to ask people at the bottom to work hard and make their way up.
Director: Bong Joon-ho Film: Parasite Cast: Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Chang Hyae-jin |