By: Kriti Bhagat
From the South Korean, Academy Award wining filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, comes the brilliant social satire on class discrimination shown through the symbiotic relationship between the rich Park household and the opportunistic Kim family- Parasite.
To quote Mr. Bong himself, “… Essentially, we all live in the same country… called Capitalism.”
This highly acclaimed film criticises Capitalism through sharp wit and many symbols and metaphors. One of the most striking, out of all, is the large rock brought to the Kim family by a friend, which is a direct symbol for wealth and prosperity, but eventually becomes the downfall for Kim Ki-woo, the son, who gets severally injured because of it. He obsesses over it, the idea of wealth, and at the end gives it up by putting it back in the river and therefore, coming full circle.
We also see the complete fascination and fixation over the West by the Parks, who easily trust English speakers and American products, as if in a trance.
The Park family is initially shown in grey light, they are called “nice” numerous times but some things said or done by them irks the Kim clan. We see the two extremes of how people get affected by heavy rains, as a take on climate change, the poor part of town gets flooded but we see
Yeon-kyo say how it’s cleaned up the air, completely oblivious to the real problems. A deeper metaphor is a literal man living right under their noses and under cruel conditions in the basement of the Park house without anyone knowing, and therefore making him to be the downtrodden being ignored by the bourgeois of society. Another powerful example are the multiple shots of Mr. Park’s face of pure disgust when he smells “the stench of poor people”, which in the end triggers Kim Ki-taek.
An opinion gone unnoticed seems to be the normalisation of Paedophilia in this tragicomedy. The intimate relationship between Da-hye, the daughter of the Park family; a high schooler, and Kim Ki-woo, is not shown as unprofessional but a romance.
But overall, the breath-taking cinematography, quick editing, brilliant writing with quotable dialogues and meticulous direction makes this film a masterpiece that keeps you thought provoked days after and justifies bagging all the well deserving Oscars, and thus being the first ever film to win the Best Movie category not in English.
Tabeer 