An uncategorizable masterpiece

Rating: 9/10 (21 February 2020)

What is one to make of the utterly uncategorisable and impossible-to-define Parasite? Only the third film to win both the Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Picture, Parasite is one of the best-reviewed films of the century thus far and caused huge waves when it became the first non-English language film to win Best Picture. Co-writer and director Bong Joon Ho also tied with Walt Disney for the most Oscars awarded to one person in one night - four. On top of that, he became the first person in history to win more than three Oscars for a single film. In short, Parasite has had a significant, and relatively unexpected, impact.
But what exactly is Parasite? Described on its official website as a "pitch-black modern fairy-tale", even a comprehensive plot summary wouldn't adequately delineate its real nature - part comedy of manners, part social satire, part heist film, part thriller, part horror, part family drama, part farce, part economic treatise, part social realism, part tragedy, part allegory. And that's just the opening scene! It's the Ulysses of cinema, adopting and shedding genres so often and so seamlessly that it effectively becomes its own genre. And, like Ulysses, it's exceptional in just about every way - screenplay (co-written by Bong and Jin Won Han), directing, cinematography, mise en scène, editing, production design, sound design, score, acting. There's not a weak link here, in a film that achieves that rarest of things - it lives up to the hype.
The Kim family are down on their luck. Father Ki-taek (Kang-ho Song), mother Chung-sook (Hye-jin Jang), daughter Ki-jeong (So-dam Park), and son Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi) reside in a tiny basement apartment, with their only window looking out onto a popular urination spot in a back alley. With all four unemployed, they eke out a meagre living folding pizza boxes for a nearby restaurant. However, their fortunes change when Ki-Woo meets Min-hyuk (Seo-joon Park), a childhood friend who is now at university. Min-hyuk works as an English tutor for the daughter of a wealthy family, but he's soon to leave Korea, and so suggests that Ki-Woo take over. Armed with a fake diploma created by Ki-jeong on Photoshop, Ki-Woo successfully applies for the job. The Park family, father Dong-ik, (Sun-kyun Lee), mother Yeon-gyo (Yeo-jeong Jo), daughter Da-hye (Ji-so Jung), and son Da-song (Hyun-jun Jung), welcomes Ki-woo into their lavish home, and upon discovering just how wealthy the Parks are, the Kims hatch an elaborate scheme to oust the Park's current domestic staff and take their places. However, it doesn't take long before things start to go very, very awry for both families, in ways none of them (or the audience) could ever have imagined.
Obviously enough, Bong's main themes are class division and class conflict, the artificiality of societal hierarchy, and the concomitant social inequality and differentiation in status that makes such a hierarchy possible in the first place. As thoroughly entertaining (and funny) as the film is, it remains, in essence, an economic treatise, albeit with a savagely satirical quality. However, make no mistake, this is a satire with teeth - the hilarity and playfulness of the long first act give way to a darker political vibe in the second, before Bong violently deconstructs his own allegory in the emotionally draining and completely bonkers third act, ultimately driving the knife home in an epilogue that's about as different from the film's early scenes as you could imagine. Of course, this is far from the first time Bong has dealt with issues of class, but never before has he been this caustic, this acerbic, but so too this compassionate, this witty. Indeed, Parasite feels like a culmination, the film to which he's been building for his entire career.
One of the most deftly-handled elements of the film is Bong's avoidance of the clichés one so often finds in films dealing with economics - the Kims are by no means the default protagonists, a victimised family immediately worthy of sympathy, whilst the Parks are by no means the default antagonists, a callous family immediately worthy of scorn. Rather, the Parks are depicted as perfectly friendly and pleasant whilst the Kims are shown to be liars and scoundrels. Indeed, it's the Kims who are the more crassly materialistic of the two families - as they ingratiate themselves with the Parks and acquire more and more access to a wealthy lifestyle, all four Kims start to carry themselves differently, as if being in such proximity to wealth has had a physiological effect.
There are no heroes and villains here - Bong is uninterested in trucking in black and white oppositions because such rigid diametrics aren't the norm in the real world. For all their scheming and lying, the Kims merely con their way into menial jobs, trying to earn enough to make survival a little easier. As for the Parks, their wealth has insulated them from the world of families such as the Kims, but their greatest crimes are disconnection and ignorance, nothing more. At the same time, the Kims are depicted as a far more unified and loving family than the Parks. Although all four Kims regularly occupy the same frame, to the best of my recollection, we never see the four Parks together in the same shot. It's a wonderful bit of cinematic shorthand to convey a thematic point, with Bong utilising the visual component of the medium to maximum effect.
It's in relation to the two family's status as heroes or villains that the film's title is so important. A parasitic organism lives in or on a host and takes its nourishment from that host. A simple reading of this is that the Kims are the parasites and the Parks are the hosts, with the Kims feeding off the Parks' wealth and status. However, in a film where nothing is as it seems, things aren't that simple. Bong depicts the Parks as parasites as well - they've been rendered relatively helpless by their wealth, unable to complete basic tasks such as driving or cleaning without the assistant of working-class employees; i.e. they sustain themselves based off of the labour of their servants. And so, just as the Kims feed off the Parks, the Parks feed off the Kims, in what quickly becomes a symbiotic relationship.
However, as strong as the film is narratively and thematically, it also has an aesthetic design to die for. Kyung-pyo Hong's cinematography, for example, is magnificent. Hong also shot the superb Beoning (2018), and the camerawork here has a similar smoothness and restlessness, gliding through the Parks house like it's a fifth member of the Kim family. Ha-jun Lee's production design is also praise-worthy, with the Kims' and Parks' living conditions contrasted in every way; the Parks live in a pristine post-modernist semi-open plan house, accessible only by an electronically controlled gate, and hidden from the street by tall trees and dense shrubs; the Kims, on the other hand, live in a cluttered and dilapidated apartment with barely any room, their toilet situated beside the aforementioned window looking into an alley.
It's also in relation to production design wherein one of the film's best metaphors is to be found, which is also a great example of just how completely Bong is in control of his craft. As a film at least partly in the tradition of the "upstairs/downstairs" subgenre, Bong literalises the separation between those above and those below insofar as stairways are a recurring motif. The Kims live in a basement apartment without stairs, mirroring their inability to rise in a socio-economic sense. On the other hand, the Parks' lavish home has two main stairways - one going up, the other going down into the cellar. As Ki-jeong and Ki-woo gain more access to Da-song and Da-hye, they start to spend most of their time upstairs. Ki-taek and Chung-sook, however, along with Dong-ik and Yeon-gyo, spend most of their time downstairs, indicating a fissure between the adults and their children. The stairway to the cellar is its own unique animal, with Bong shooting it like he's suddenly directing a horror film (there's a thematic reason for this that I can't go into without spoilers). In this way, he bestows upon it an ominousness that, at first, makes little sense, but ultimately reveals itself to be a spectacular bit of foreshadowing. There's also a third stairway in the Park home, one not revealed until late in the second act, but one which will have huge narrative and thematic importance.
Parasite is a masterpiece, with Bong, operating at the peak of his abilities, never putting a foot wrong. It could have been a self-serving and didactic message-movie - a homily to the honour of the poor or a deconstruction of the unhappiness of the rich - but Bong is far too talented for that, allowing the film to find its own space. Quite unlike anything I've ever seen, it works as allegory just as well as it works as social realism just as well as it works as comedy just as well as it works as tragedy, and so on. This is cinema as art, a film which has proven itself very much a game-changer and completely deserving of every bit of praise it's received.