It’s not easy to categorize Parasite, the new film by Korean director Bong Joon Ho, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, into any specific genre.
Some call it a black comedy, others a fierce social satire, or an absurd thriller. For some, it’s even a drama with horror overtones.
According to the director himself, it is “a comedy without clowns or a tragedy without villains.”
In other words: “The story of humor, horror, and sadness that emerge when the poor try to reach the same level of social welfare as the rich but clash with the harsh law of reality.”
The story revolves around a poor family in Seoul, living in a squalid and damp basement apartment.
Young Ki-Woo, by forging some documents, becomes the private English tutor for the daughter of the extremely wealthy Park family.
The Parks live in a splendid house on a hill.
The doors of their home also open for his sister and parents, hired respectively as an art teacher, housekeeper, and driver, but all at the cost of lies and manipulations.
Up to this point, we are in the realm of comedy, laughing at the small, grand deceptions through which the modest sneak into the lives of the wealthy.
But the smell of the poor cannot be erased, and as the director warns, the two social classes cannot coexist.
One day, in fact, taking advantage of the homeowners’ absence, someone arrives looking for someone else, and the basement of the house reveals a long-hidden secret.
This secret will ignite a brutal reckoning, reminiscent of the one on the speeding train in Snowpiercer, also directed by Bong Joon Ho and centered on social inequalities, as well as those depicted by Lanthimos in The Killing of a Sacred Deer and by Peele in Us.
Though the inspiration for the Korean director comes mainly from the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, with Psycho taking center stage this time.
The film showcases the director’s extraordinary narrative skills, his ability to depict the fractured state of our times.
A personal style full of inventions, always in the service of a story that will keep you on the edge of your seat for over two hours.
“I don’t like to follow rules and conventions of genre films,” says Bong Joon Ho, who had this story in mind since 2013.
“I try to address the theme of a polarized society, bent under capitalism, by breaking the codes.”
Although he considers himself a “genre” director, he always strives to defy the audience’s expectations.
He adds: “In today’s society, there is still a caste system, though it is invisible to the eye.
We think that social hierarchies belong to the past simply because we don’t see them, but the truth is there are boundaries that cannot be crossed.
In the film, it’s impossible to separate the good from the bad because the rich, for example, are kind people and far from greedy, unlike those often seen on screen.
In short, I want the audience to be able to identify with every character on stage.” And negotiations for an English-language remake of the film have already begun.
Parasite, a drama about the castes of our time… Impossible to place it in a specific genre. Parasite blends several genres together.
Source: Avvenire
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