the ghost comes out of the closet
by Douglas Messerli
Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won (screenplay,
based on a story by Bong Joon-ho), Bong Joon-ho (director) / Parasite /
2019
The first winner for South Korea of the Cannes
Festival’s Palme d’Or, director Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 film Parasite has a
great many things on its mind.
The Kim family, the unemployed driver Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), his wife Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin), their son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), and daughter Ki-jung (Park So-dam) are all rather talented and certainly capable individuals, and quite brilliant as con-men-and-women. Yet the society has given them little opportunity to demonstrate their talents. And they have been forced to live in a semi-basement with open windows that view the local drunk pissing against their building and fumigating trucks filling their small space with poisonous fumes.
They get Wi-fi illegally (when they can) from local cafés. Their only
income is from folding pizza boxes for a local pizzeria, but even the small
amount of money they make from that is threatened when some of their work
proves to be shoddy in their attempt to outdo another local assembler. They
hardly have a decent place to bathe, let alone a good kitchen; but then they
hardly can afford food to cook. The best place to tune the Wi-fi is squatting
upon their toilet.
In
short, the Kims have found themselves at the near bottom of a society sprung up
beautifully during the last few decades into a 21st century model of riches and
wealth. And in that sense Bong begins is dark comedy as a kind of
naturalist-like treatise, not unlike Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths.
Fortunately, Bong quickly shifts gears with a magical appearance of Ki-woo’s educated friend Min-hyuk, who in moving on to
a higher education, asks his young friend to take over his position as English
tutor for a wealthy family, the Parks’ daughter, Da-hye. When Ki-woo finds
himself somewhat abashed by the offer, his friend points out to him that
Ki-wood has passed the exams several times (obviously it’s simply money that
has prevented the boy to move on a higher education). Finally, the friend
suggests that he is in love with Da-hye and feels Ki-woo will protect her until
she graduates, when he plans to marry her.
The Kim daughter, an artist and master forger, quickly whips a phony
college certificate, and the handsome Kim son is hired, mostly on the basis of
Min-hyuk’s recommendations (something Mrs. Park relies on more than documents),
for the job, finding himself in Da-hye’s bedroom to tutor the lovely young girl
in the modernist architectural masterwork in which the Park’s live.
Suddenly Bong’s film switches to the more comic mode of a film more akin to Harold Prince’s 1970 American black comedy, Something for Everyone, wherein the handsome Michael York entering a Bavarian castle as a servant, sexually ingratiates himself with son, mother, and, later, daughter. Except here, the young tutor does not necessarily use sex as a tool—although Da-hye quickly does romantically fall for him—but social and political politesse—suggesting that the somewhat artistic son of the Park family—who comically is completely absorbed in all things native American Indian, but seems also quite hyper-active and even mentally disturbed, having witnessed a ghost on one of his young birthdays—might be helped by art therapy.
Before you can even blink, Mrs. Park (Cho Yeo-jeong) has hired Ki-woo’s
talented sister Ki-jung (after she has Googled “art therapy”) who appears to
successfully quiet down the Park’s son through her teachings, while hinting
that the child may have schizophrenic tendencies.
A
ride home with the family’s chauffeur, who insinuates that he wants to know
more about her, results in Ki-jung taking revenge by leaving her panties
planted near the back seat, where Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun) discovers them the
next morning on his way to work. Forced to fire his handsome chauffeur, fearing
he has had sex with a woman in the car and perhaps even killed her, the two
Kims suggest they might know of a man who might reputably replace him—obviously
their own father.
In
no time at all, the pater familias of the Kims has insinuated that their
current housekeeper, the loyal Gook Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun) has tuberculosis,
and she too is fired, replaced by, you guessed it, Kim’s wife, a woman he
describes as “Jessica.”
Perhaps not so strangely, the talented Kims turn a household in
disorder, even while its current tenants live in luxury, to order—teaching,
driving, and cooking quite effortlessly, even if each night they return to the
squalor in which they are forced to exist. It is quite apparent that they are better
equipped to live in this mansion than are the Parks. In a sense, they are in
control of this architectural wonder, while the Parks, although providing its
finances, are truly the squatters.
The
slow-learning daughter, their small would-be Indian son, the half-drugged-out
wife, and the haughty businessman only inhabit it at night, and even then,
their son prefers the Indian teepee in their overly green back yard. And when
the Parks determine to go on a camping excursion, the Kims sleep over, bathe in
their golden bathrooms, and drink themselves into a kind of brooding frenzy.
This half of the film, in itself, would constitute a wonderful satiric
movie, but Bong has deeper motives still, as his work turns another corner to
become a kind of revenge tragedy. For living in a hidden bunker in the mansion,
perhaps even more stark than the Kims’ basement habitation, is the bankrupt
husband of Moon-gwang, hiding for years from bill-collectors in a kind of
safe-house created by the original architect-owner for protection if ever
needed.
The housekeeper comes to feed and, perhaps “collect” her husband, only
to find the Kims in midst of their celebration. Charging forward, she films the
illegal celebrants and threatens to report their existence to the Parks, as
they attempt to steal her cellphone and to destroy both her and her husband.
Suddenly what was a seemingly righteous inversion of cultural injustices
turns sour, particularly when the Park family calls to announce they are soon
returning home because of heavy rain, and Chung-sook, instructed to cook up
ramen while the other members of her family hide throughout the house, must
clean up the mess. In Moon-gwang’s attempt to return to the kitchen, Kim’s wife
slams the door back, sending the former housekeeper down the stairs to her
eventual death.
As
Bo Seo wrote in a very intelligent essay in The Atlantic, we can no
longer feel either sad or happy for the Kims.
“Though Parasite is mainly about
interclass conflict, its most brutal scenes depict fights between members of
the working poor. Here, as in the rest of Bong’s films, violence is not a path
to liberation; it instead offers a fleeting catharsis that upholds more of the
status quo than it destroys. For families like the Kims, advancement under
capitalism involves beating out their peers for limited opportunities, to the
extent that parity with others in the working class begins to feel like
failure.
In
their attempts to get ahead, the Kims end up replicating the abuses of the
wealthy—fraud, conspiracy, blackmail, and assault—against the poor, whose ranks
they desperately wish to leave. When Ki-taek wonders about the fate of the
driver his family schemed to get fired, Ki-jung snaps: “We’re the ones who need
help. Worry about us, okay?” But unlike the rich, the Kims cannot hide
their transgressions behind masks of
respectability and institutional legitimacy. When the basis for their
employment by the Parks is revealed to be nepotism, a mainstay of elite
consolidation, the news media and their audiences are scandalized."
While I generally do not attempt to keep the plot away from readers,
about the final feverish scenes of violence which end in several deaths, as if
right out of a Quentin Tarantino movie, I will remain mum. Although almost
mortally wounded, three of the Kim family survive, although no one knows to
where Mr. Kim himself has disappeared.
The
film’s ending might almost seem uplifting, as Ki-woo, back in his semi-basement
hovel, finally determines to finish his schooling, make a lot of money, and
free his semi-imprisoned father by buying the Park mansion, now owned by a
German family.
In
that determination, however, Bong asks his society and us if, in any society
with such class divides, is this simply a pipe dream or might it be possible to
heal the past? The answer, of course, does not lie in the film, but in the
determination of the society to change conditions. I do not feel positive. But
dreams are necessary to make anything happen. If his father, after the family
has suffered a flooding of their own decrepit apartment, suggests that one
should never make “plans,” since they always fail, this young boy is making
plans, is imagining a world outside of that in which he has lived. And any
caring person in the world knows that such “plans” are the only way out.
Los Angeles, October 23, 2019
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October
2019).
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