Parasite

Rating: 7/10 (24 February 2020)

Parasite became the first foreign language film to win the Best Picture Oscar. The first third of the film had me wondering why.
The film opens in a dilapidated, smelly semi basement in South Korea. The Kim family is so poor that they need to borrow a neighbour's wifi and lose it when it becomes password protected. They make a living by folding cardboard pizza boxes.
Dad, Ki-taek is the weak link. He cannot even fold the boxes properly so their meagre wages are deducted. Son, Ki-woo gets a stroke of fortune, when a friend helps him get a well paid tutoring job with a fake diploma. Ki-woo tutors the daughter of of the wealthy Park family who live in a lavish mansion. Soon Ki-woo gets his sister Ki-jung a job as an art tutor for the disruptive younger son.
The wily Ki-jung conspires to get the Park's family chauffeur fired and have him replaced by their father. Before long they manoeuvre to get the housekeeper dismissed by preying on her allergy to peaches and be replaced by their mother Chung-sook.
All of them claim to be strangers to the Park family, pretty soon the Kim's are earning good money and living well. They are street smart who have taken advantage of the naivety of the wealthy Parks.
Their good fortune is threatened when one night when the Park's are away on a break, the former housekeeper returns looking for something she left behind.
I thought the movie would turn out to be similar to Joseph Losey's The Servant which was scripted by Harold Pinter. It goes in that direction but then swerves off.
When Bong Joon Ho accepted his best director Oscar he publicly thanked Martin Scorsese. It was his movies Bong studied in film school. The key is Scorsese's own British influences ranging from Ealing Films, Hitchcock to Powell & Pressburger.
There is a parasite in the Park household but the film is about class. A fatalistic, metaphorical dark comedy which morphs into a twisted blood soaked tragedy.
Parasite has a heightened reality, the Parks are wealthy who never look down even in their own house as they have no need to. They are nice but when one of them inadvertently mentions the odour of ordinary working people, like those who travel in crowded tube trains, they seal their fate.
Bong shows that those in the bottom rung of South Korean society cannot advance very far. Ki-woo has a dream but it is more likely to be dashed, fate and fortune will ensure of that.