Author rating: 3/5
A poor family from an unspecified South Korean city insinuates itself into another rich and wealthy family to take the job of the domestic staff who worked there. This, in summary, the plot of P, latest Korean film Bong joon-ho. Winner of the Palme d'Or at the last Cannes Film Festival and nominated for an Oscar 2020.
Let's say right away that these are well-deserved awards: all the ingredients are there for a high quality work. First of all the subject and the screenplay, signed by the director himself, of absolute level for originality and creativity. Some passages such as, for example, the cell phone used as an improper weapon "if you don't go back, I'll press the enter key" visually mark our time where the telephone (and calling it that already sounds obsolete) is not just a simple voice communication tool but a fundamental component of our daily life, whether we like it or not.
The background, the context, in which the story takes place is now almost a thread that sums up well many contemporary metropolitan societies: the conflict between generations, between social groups, between those who are rich and those who will be eternally poor, between those who live in the center and those in the degraded suburbs, between those who are below and who is above. It reminded us of the recent Downtown Abbey where exactly the clash was between the different floors, between the noble one upstairs and that of the servants downstairs. Also in this case the stories of the two families are intertwined in the different physical levels where they live: the parasitic family in a basement cavern (which in a sequence of remarkable effect will be flooded by a storm) and the parasitic one in a sumptuous house designed by a well-known architect.
In turn, a further second level lives inside the house, hidden by a secret door, where a person lives (we won't tell you more so as not to reveal too much). It is a real figurative and metaphorical class struggle where the purpose of the former is to survive the latter with the hope of the "parasite" reversing roles and taking over the new social identity and therefore being able to enter university and own a house worthy of the name.
The film winds along the outline of the many characters in a very effective way: each with its own well-marked identity and well balanced in the narrative mechanism. Actors of excellent ability such as the South Korean school has accustomed us to seeing and, in this regard, it is necessary to remember an important trademark with director Park Chan-wook and his personal vision of cinematic violence (the revenge trilogy).
Also in this case, after a starting phase of the story where all the different protagonists are positioned, at a certain point an infernal mechanism of unimaginable brutality explodes with sequences of rare hardness. The reading levels of Parasite are multiple and each one reveals a different world that intertwines, meets and collides continuously until the final catharsis, a kind of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, where everything explodes in slow motion and the bloody violence itself becomes almost comical at times.
A note in particular deserves attention: the lights and photography. Cinema is a story in images and its quality is essentially based on how and how much the film that runs on the screen is able to strike, impress, our sensations and perceptions. In this case each frame is almost perfect in its chromatic balance, in the arrangement of the planes, in the position of the natural lights, of the shots of the close-ups as well as those of the total fields.
Little else to add. In order to pass into the category of masterpiece, perhaps one more step is needed and it consists in making a story universal which, as far as we have seen, only addresses a part of our contemporary world. The social clash and the violence that can ensue from it require a reading that cinema alone is unable to provide. Anyway, you don't win an international award like Cannes by chance. This movie deserves it all.
