Bong Joon-ho Rabidly Admonishes the Inequities of Capitalism and Class

Nobody makes movies like Bong Joon-ho and Bong Joon-ho’s movies are unlike anything else in cinema. His genre-eclectic style, darkly comic sensibility, and relentlessly sharp social commentary has made him one of the most unique figures in world cinema, finally recognized for his keen artistry and exemplary voice by Cannes this summer when they awarded him the Palme d’Or for his latest feature Parasite –a film highly deserving of the accolade. It’s Bong at his fiercest, his most relevant, and his most artistically adept as he ruthlessly skewers wealth disparity and class politics in the modern age.

Much like Bong’s masterful Snowpiercer, the major theme of Parasite isn’t subtle. The opening scenes introduce us to the Kim family living in a squalid basement apartment each folding pizza boxes for a living in circumstances so dreary and desperate they keep at it even while their home is being gassed with insecticide to meet their quota. They piggy-back off an extremely volatile wifi signal and are accustomed to a drunk regularly urinating just outside their window. By contrast, the wealthy Parks live in absolute splendour in a clean and capacious modernist home not far away, where they never have to interact with the working class outside of their servants. Through a friend, Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-Shik) gets a job with the Parks as an English tutor for their teenage daughter, and slowly but surely the rest of the family integrate themselves into various roles in the Park household: Ki-jeong (Park So-dam) as an art therapist for the younger son, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) as a chauffeur, and Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin) as the family housekeeper, sabotaging the current staff and hoodwinking the extremely gullible Parks in the process.

The Kims, in spite of the deviousness and deceitfulness of their actions, are thoroughly likeable and resonant from beginning to end; because not only is their situation immensely sympathetic, but their employers are so grossly privileged yet easy to manipulate it’s impossible to feel bad for them. Ki-jeong, posing as “Jessica”, in one scene identifies a detail of the childs’ drawings as suggestive of schizophrenia to the utter horror of Park matriarch Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong) who is incapable of seeing through the young womans’ obvious bullshitting. However what makes the comedy in these cons so affective is how authentic the Parks are in their ignorance –they aren’t cartoon characters –as well as how clever and shrewd the Kims are, scripting whole conversations and intricately plotting their subterfuges to the finest detail.

But of course the film is much more than simply a comedy of poor people playing off the naivety of rich people, because they are doing so at the expense of other poor people, specifically a driver and housekeeper they arrange to have fired. And it’s in the outcome of this maliciousness that the movie gets most interesting in its second act. I’ve written at length on Bong Joon-ho’s fascination with weirdness to convey commentary, and it’s exactly what he does here through a bizarre twist that drives home the frequently unremarked upon truth that for the working classes under capitalism, ones’ success is dependent on another’s failure. Someone must be left behind for you to get ahead.

Bong’s principal target however remains the rich who benefit most from the warped system. But he chooses not to play the Parks as overly harsh –we never see them directly mistreat or look down their noses at the less-fortunate. It’s perhaps worse in that they seem to barely acknowledge their existence. Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) can only identify Ki-taek’s particular smell as the kind he senses in the vicinity of subways. The Kims have one particularly interesting conversation when left in the house alone, where they acknowledge the relative niceness of the Parks, but also that it’s a tainted niceness borne out of their wealth and the fact they’ve never had to work or suffer to achieve anything. There’s an underside to their every courtesy and refinement. One morning, Yeon-gyo remarks on how nice the previous nights’ rainfall was to Chung-sook, whose whole neighbourhood was flooded out because of it. Never afraid to delve into the darkness of the issues and ideas he addresses, Bong weaves a hardened resentfulness of the manner in which the upper classes perceive and ignore the lower classes throughout the film, and lets it simmer with the care of an artisan until the time comes for it to burst forth with a fury.

Bong blends a few different types of movies with Parasite and demonstrates his acquired expertise in each of them. From the way he frames comedic beats to building tension in a couple suspenseful scenes, to shooting one Kim deception with the pacing and editing of a heist movie, he’s got an understanding of the versatility of cinematic language to rival any great filmmaker, and delights in breaking it down. There are humourous moments that are also unsettling, grimness undercutting major emotional beats. And all of it is natural. Bong shoots the Parks’ manor emphasizing its’ spaciousness, its relative emptiness and isolation to capture the essence of luxury, while the Kims’ apartment is cramped and dilapidated with even the colour grading seeming to improve with the Kims’ comfortable employment.

Every actor is great too. Song Kang-ho stars in his fourth movie with Bong and is excellent in one of his sharpest roles yet, and easily his most compelling character since The Host. The Korean-Canadian Choi is just as good, carrying the film in a number of moments, particularly towards the end. Jang is a delight as the warmest (yet still severe) member of the Kim clan, Park Myung-hoon plays a wonderfully nuts surprise character, and Cho is superb as the lethargic idiot housewife, owning many of the movies’ funniest moments. But the breakout star has to be Park So-dam, who carries herself in every scene with an exquisite degree of confidence and control; conveying a commitment, tact, and skillfulness in her character that far outshines her co-stars. The same performance quality that was evident in Go Ah-sung in The Host.

But then, it’s not exactly the same -because Parasite is incomparable. As potent as Snowpiercer, as passionate as Okja, as unrelenting as Memories of Murder or Mother, as fresh and unique as any film this South Korean Master has made in his twenty-year career. A vehement condemnation of the repercussions of late-stage capitalism expressed in a resoundingly singular way, its’ final moments are haunting; tragic and meaningful and strangely close-to-home for many across languages and cultures. The worthy last nail in the coffin Bong longs to bury classism in.

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