Arts and Lifestyle Wednesday Presented Cinematic Visions-Exceptional Exception

Wow.

As the lights went up on Monday after the conclusion of director Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite”, I audibly said “Wow”. I had attended a late afternoon screening attended by just a couple of dozen others. As I walked outside, I looked around to catch the glances of those around me. We all gave each other the same look, that we had been gobsmacked by an exceptional, emotional, gripping, film that worked in just about every area of cinema you could experience.

A couple of things to begin. I am sensitive to the fact that the average moviegoer might have reservations about seeing a foreign language film with subtitles. I have a dose of that myself, but one of the myriad wonderful things about this movie was that by about a third of the way in, I realized that I had completely forgotten that I was even reading the subtitles. It seems, and I hope, that becoming the first foreign language film to win the Best Picture Oscar has attracted more reticent movie-goers to the film upon its re-release, and this review of a movie that came out back in October is also an attempt to do just that.

Also, this review is going to be pretty light on plot description after the initial set-up. If you have seen the praise for the film, but don’t know that much about the story, you will be that much better for the experience. I knew a bit about the basic plot line, but not much, and that surely added to the enjoyment. Go in as blind as you can. The initial premise is that of a very poor family of four which lives in a basement apartment in a very bad Seoul, South Korea neighborhood, trying to scrape out a meager existence with odd jobs like folding pizza boxes. Fortune begins to shine after the son of the family, Kim Ki-Woo (Choi Woo-shik) is gifted with a landscaping stone from a friend, who says that it is purported to bring riches.

That friend, Min-hyuk, is a university student who is about to go abroad. He recommends Ki-Woo to his wealthy employer, whom he is serving as an English tutor for the family’s daughter. Ki-Woo incorporates his sister, Kim Ki-Jeong (Park So-dam) to assist him in fabricating some university papers, and he gets the tutor job. He quickly impresses the very nice, but vapid, mother Choi Yeon-gyo (Cho-yeo-jeong), and also garners the affections of the daughter Park Day-hye (Jung Ji-so). I realize that none of these actors are familiar in any way to most, but it seems highly unfair to not credit them as usual just because of that. The cast is uniformly brilliant.

Ki-Woo is dubbed Kevin by the mother, and his hiring starts a con job by the Kim family. “Kevin” convinces the mother that her hyper-rambunctious son’s drawings show real talent and that she should hire an art tutor for him. Mom gobbles that up, and soon Ki-Woo’s sister Ki-Jeong is employed and is dubbed Jessica, the nicknames a reflection of the Parks love for all things American. “Jessica” even ups the ante by suggesting that the boy’s abstract renderings, and an earlier incident, reflect a troubled mind. For an additional fee, she adds the role of art therapist to her employ. Ki-Jeong is the most gifted grifter (who also does want to be a real artist) of the Kim clan, and she gets the family driver fired by leaving her panties in the car, which convinces the father that the driver was having sex in his car, although Ki-Jeong says no advances were made on her.

So now Dad, Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) has a gig as driver, and it isn’t long before Mom, Park Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin) is aboard as housekeeper after a scheme convinces the gullible Park’s that their longtime, and beloved housekeeper Gook-Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-jun) has a contagious disease. All four of the Kims have created separate identities and present themselves as unrelated. So now all them have excellent employment, and life is looking good. At this point, we have viewed a well-executed, funny, observant, and rather standard film.

But two plot twists, one easily expected, one not, turn the movie on its head. The Parks head out for a family camping trip, and the Kims take over the house, and have a drunken feast in the gorgeous and palatial home. It’s raining outside, and a serious mess is being made inside in the living room, so you can pretty much expect that the Kims are going to ditch the trip and come home well ahead of schedule. But just prior to that messing things up, the previous housekeeper shows up at the front door, pleading to get in for a moment to retrieve an item she left behind.

Folks, that’s where the synopsis ends. What the housekeeper has left in the basement, and what goes on subsequently, sends us from a slightly dark comedy about class conflicts and social inequality into gripping second and third acts that are part thriller, part horror film, part REALLY dark comedy. The movie is just about everything but a musical, but an opera singer does make an appearance at a birthday party, which is extremely appropriate because the operatic plot overtones are palpable.

From the time the drunken party begins and you feel the foreboding sense that this is all about to go horribly wrong, the tension is suffocating. It’s almost never that you can say that a movie seems far longer than it was is actually high praise, but in this case it is true. The film runs about two hours, but since you spend the back half of it tensely glued to the screen, and with laser attention to what may come next, it seemed more like three, and if it had been, I could have cared less.

Boong Joon-Ho won the Best Director Academy award against a star-studded line-up that also included Quentin Tarantino, Sam Mendes, and Martin Scorcese, three giants in the craft. I thought afterward that each of those three could have well been the director of parts of this film, but for Boong to do the whole damn thing was an amazing feat. There are flourishes of great directors past and present at play here. Heck, as the parodying of the upper class was unfolding early, I thought of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges from the thirties and forties. Often in lists of films, it will say “genre”. The only word that could have been used here is “All”.

I think I would have seen this movie, I usually do see all of the nominated films, but winning the Oscar pushed me over the top, and got me past any of the sub-title reservations. What a Godsend. About the only other two films I have seen where I had the same feeling walking out of a theater were “Saving Private Ryan”, and “Manchester by the Sea”. But those were different, tension was high from the outset. This suckered you in, you were smiling and laughing just before you had to whistle past the graveyard.

I sure as hell know the next time I will see a sub-titled film, if not sooner. That’s the next time Boong Joon Ho puts one out.

Clink Scale 9.6