“Parasite doesn’t exactly redefine the concept of the upstairs-downstairs satire so much as it infuses it with a dark-hued clarity about class structure, and it refuses to condemn anyone involved in navigating the implacable two-way system of social mobility it so pitilessly portrays, even if several of the key navigators might not be left standing by the film’s final fade. Bong Joon-ho’s previous, and horizontally oriented, Snowpiercer grappled with similar notions of imposed privilege and struggle, depicting an oppressed class’s attempts to move forward and depose the tyrannical political system keeping them at bay on a futuristic train hurtling through a forbidding, iced-over landscape, but with a far heavier touch. As Parasite’s Kim Ki-woo, the young man whose family occupies the charred heart of Bong’s unforgiving worldview, might say, that’s so metaphorical!
“Eschewing Snowpiercer’s more linear ham-handedness, Bong conjures this new film, which posits a social purgatory up from which the Kim family desperately (and literally) has to climb in concocting a scheme for survival which will prove to be both understandable and fatally flawed, with insouciance and acid purpose. Parasite’s protagonists, the denizens of a partially submerged basement apartment whose windows look directly out into the gutters of a crowded and filthy urban street, are looking for any way to survive. They stumble upon a way to insinuate themselves into a home of the Parks, a super-rich family residing in the hills, where Bong’s social critique is allowed to develop the real, sharp teeth laying in patient wait behind the good-natured smile of its opening third. There may be several moments during Parasite when Ki-woo’s astonished observation may be just as apt, but the movie’s built-in auto-critique defuses the relative obviousness of Bong’s dramatic strategies by serving them up with healthy doses of empathy and humor. By the point when the wealthy Park family takes off for a weekend camping trip, leaving the run of their spacious and modern mansion to the Kims, you can practically taste the glee with which Bong has taken to ensure that the hooks are in his audience, who will likely have no idea of the depths to which his demonically entertaining film is about to plunge them.
“2019 was widely considered to be a very good, very diverse year for movies, and even with all those great films to talk about, it still became the year of Parasite. Somehow, amongst strong, heavily praised work from Martin Scorsese, Terence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and a host of other celebrated directors, Bong Joon-ho’s film managed to secure close to a consensus among the most opinionated observers of film as the clear choice for the year’s best. The most award-averse among us would have never been able to predict it, even as Parasite emerged as a triumphant Palme D’Or winner from last year’s Cannes Film Festival, but one still has to wonder with delight just how Oscar managed to get it so right this year. You might have to go all the way back to 2007 and the decisive win of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men to come up with a more unlikely, more existentially despairing, and more completely right choice for the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year, despite what our orange-colored Film Critic in Chief thinks. (‘How bad were the Academy Awards this year? Did you see it?’ Trump recently asked a jeering crowd at one of his rallies. ‘And the winner is… a movie from South Korea! What the hell was that all about? We got enough problems with South Korea with trade. On top of it, they give him best movie of the year? Was it good? I don’t know.’)
“But Trump’s cynical derision might inadvertently be more reflective of Bong’s point than 45 could ever understand. Fittingly, a movie about corrosive social division, division which stands as the norm in which all of us, rich and poor, might seem hopelessly mired, has become a massive worldwide hit at the same time those very same divisions are being sown for political and financial profit by bureaucratic hacks and the dangerous demagogues they empower. Who’s playing whom?
“Parasite ends on a note of desperate fantasy, detailing the musings of a young man who can only concoct elaborate projections of his own ultimate wealth and economic rescue conjured to assuage the guilt he feels over his family’s devastation and the cloistered imprisonment of his father. And that young man cannot sustain believe in those fantasies for more than a moment at a time before sinking back down into the cruel subterranean misery where we first saw him at the beginning of the film. The final descent of the camera which concludes Parasite, in what might be a prelude to genuine madness, is a cold slap of reality, what Bong Joon-ho has described as ‘a sure-fire kill,’ even as it displays the razor-sharp instincts of a born storyteller employed to send an audience back into the world exhilarated, on a melancholic contact high from 135-minutes proximity to absolute filmmaking mastery. When I jotted down my thoughts about the movie after seeing Parasite for the first time, the notion that it might be, on its own terms, a perfect movie occurred to me more than once. Five months, three screenings, and four Academy Awards later, nothing much has made me think to change my mind. It’s a sure-fire kill in just about every way.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
Muriel’s Top 25 Films of 2019
1. Parasite [366 points / 32 votes]
2. The Irishman [292/27]
3. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood [253.5/23]
4. Uncut Gems [217.5/24]
5. Little Women [172/18]
6. Portrait of a Lady on Fire [146/16]
7. Marriage Story [141/15]
8. Pain and Glory [107/12]
9. A Hidden Life [98/9]
10. Transit [95/10]
11. Us [94.5/10]
12. Knives Out [92/11]
13. Ash Is Purest White [90.5/9]
14. The Lighthouse [87/10]
15. Atlantics [83/9]
16. Dolemite Is My Name [82/10]
17. The Farewell [74/8]
18. The Souvenir [72/7]
19. Ad Astra [62/7]
20. 1917 [62/5]
21. Her Smell [61/7]
22. High Life [59/8]
23. Dragged Across Concrete [58/5]
24. The Last Black Man in San Francisco [57/6]
25. Asako I & II [47.5/5]
No comments:
Post a Comment