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@tvnerdaran
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Over the 2010’s and early 2020’s, there has been a major political awakening, with young people getting more involved in politics than ever before, and public figures from both the left and right sides of the political spectrum now being more vocal than ever before. With the rise of divisive right-wing leaders like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Boris Johnson, as well as left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn awakening politically dormant youngsters into fighting for social change and a more equal society, we are now in a major era of socio-political upheaval. With much of the current upheaval and worldly issues like poverty, war, disease and class conflict, there comes a defining film of our times: a film which speaks volumes to the current world that we live in, and that film is Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 masterpiece,“Parasite”.
Taking the world by storm, ”Parasite” won both the prestigious Palme D’or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and swept the Oscars the following year, being the first foreign-language film to win the coveted Best Picture prize. Why has a relatively low-budget film from South Korea taken the world by such storm and become such a massive cultural phenomenon? It’s because the themes, messages and story of “Parasite” are largely universal to the world we live in, and the film speaks to us all living across the world with its themes of poverty, wealth, class conflict, and the injustices of our world today. With its universal themes and mass-pleasing accessibility, “Parasite” has almost single-handedly become the defining film of our times.
”Parasite” focuses on an impoverished family known as the Kims, who seek to escape their dire existence in poverty, and climb the social ladder to seek a better life for themselves. They find this opportunity through scheming and conning their way to employment for the wealthy Park family, before soon forming a symbiotic relationship with the Parks, and coming into conflict with the Parks’ previous housekeeper Moon-gwang and her mentally unstable husband when their secret is discovered.
The film is masterful in blending various different genres, with the film feeling at many points, simultaneously like a comedy, a drama and a thriller. All of this rests on the brilliant direction of Bong Joon-ho who wields a Hitchcockian style over the film’s ability to blend and experiment with different genres. The first half of the film plays like a comedy-drama, with the Kims seeking to escape their impoverished existence by lying and scheming their way to getting employed by the Parks, costing their hard-working previous employees their jobs along the way. The Kims then continue to enjoy their newfound privilege until Moon-gwang, the previous housekeeper, reappears and a secret is discovered that threatens to unveil the Kims’ conning ways.
As Moon-gwang arrives at the Park household and retreats into the basement, where she is revealed to be hiding her mentally unstable husband Geun-sae, whose situation is even more dire than that of the Kim’s. But the two lovers soon discover the Kims to be the con artists that they are, and the rest of the film thus plays as a thriller that keeps the audience on the edge of their seats, while the Kims wrestle against Moon-gwang and Geun-sae for survival.
Bong Joon-ho masterfully balances tension and suspense with riveting social commentary on the parasitic relationship between the higher and lower classes, until all of these tensions reach a boiling point at the film’s bloody climax, where a birthday massacre and its horrific fallout subsequently end the film in tragedy.
The film speaks to the times we live in, with its commentary on the parasitic dependency that both the higher and lower classes have on each other, with the higher classes parasitically exploiting the lower classes and remaining deliberately oblivious to their suffering, while the poor depend on the rich for survival and a basic standard of living, echoing the message that left-wing leaders such as Bernie Sanders have been trying to convey to the masses over the last five years.
Overall, “Parasite” is a masterfully scathing social satire that heavily speaks to the times we live in, and because of that it’s almost no wonder that the film became such a hit and swept so many awards shows as a result.
By @tvnerdaran
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