Bong Joon-ho is a peculiar filmmaker. He’s a huge fan of genres and tries to merge pop culture and authorship in his movies. He’s brave even making mistakes, and this is a virtue. Most of all he has a vivid contemporary vision and is aware of the political responsibility that an author must consider. He filled all these elements in Parasite and won the Golden Palm at Cannes.
There are many genres in this social and morality play about a bunch of poor and brilliant grifters sneaking into the house and life of a rich family in Seoul. Comedy, drama, horror and even sci-fi remembering classics such as Invasion of Body Snatchers and Alien.
Parasite is a work of synthesis
Because all the elements were present in his previous works. There’s a class struggle just like in The Host and Snowpiercer, there’s a lot of history of South Korea, a country still divided and wounded. There’s the monster, more than one actually, the assassin and the survivor and they are all haunted by sin, even if probably guilty of nothing but struggling to survive.
Parasite is a disorienting movie, it’s so rich in content that it makes a retrospective view quite difficult. The highest risk is drowning in the flood of events that succeed each other with scientific accuracy and are punctuated by a very jazzy cinematic rhythm and an unavoidable descent into hell.
Parasite has not a primary reading key
There’s the adamant metaphor of the eternal struggle between north and south. It’s an anticapitalist pamphlet and a deep thought about the family institution and its nihilist contemporary evolution. Once digging there’s always the same discovery following different tunnels, which usually means properly writing a story.
Bong prefers a dryer style this time.
Very geometric, tuning with the architecture of the story. He uses perspective and depth of field in a magnificent narrative way to give the necessary room to bodies. Lights and colours shift progressively, and the glossy Architectural Digest style turns into a dark horror atmosphere and disturbing David Lynch’s saturation.
The cast is outstanding, led by Bong’s fetish Song Kang-ho that transmits to his fellow actors and the audience all the wishes of the director.
Parasite is a Pirandellian story, there are characters looking for an author and Mattia Pascal. And there is even more to say about one of the best movies in years that maybe one could also be considered a masterpiece. It wouldn’t be a waste of time to discuss more about Parasite, hoping that such beauty could remain untouched through time.