PARASITE!

Hi beautiful people, sorry for not posting yesterday, I had a little problem and my mind wasn't on it. Let's talk about movies, specifically the movie Parasite, another of South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's masterpieces.

It's a 2019 drama, suspense, and dark humor movie, starring Song Kang-ho (Snowpiercer), Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Jang Hye-jin, Choi Woo-shik, and Park So-dam. The film premiered on May 21st, 2019 at the Cannes Film Festival, where it became the first South Korean film to earn the Palme d'Or and the first to do so with the unanimous vote of the jury since 2013 in which it won the movie La vie d'Adèle.

It was launched in South Korea by CJ Entertainment on May 30th, 2019, and in the rest of the world between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. It raised $128 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing launch and the 19th highest grossing film in South Korea.

PRODUCTION

Script:

The idea for Parasite originated in 2013 while working on Snowpiercer, Bong was encouraged by a theater actor friend to write a play. He had been a tutor for the son of a wealthy family in Seoul when he was in his early twenties, and considered turning his experience into a theatrical production. After completing Snowpiercer, Bong wrote a fifteen-page film treatment for the first half of Parasite, which his production assistant Han Jin-won converted into three different drafts of the script.

Filming:

Filming began on May 18th, 2018 and ended 77 days later on September 19th, 2018. The Park family home, which in the film says was designed by a fictional architect named Namgoong Hyeonja, was a set brand new. Production designer Lee Ha-jun said the sun was an important factor in building the outdoor set.

SYNOPSIS:

Both Kim Ki-Taek and his family are out of work. When their oldest son, Ki-Woo, begins teaching private lessons in the Park's wealthy home, the two families, who have a lot in common despite belonging to two completely different worlds, form a relationship of unpredictable results. He begins to sneak the other members of his family into the house, such as his sister as an art teacher, his mother as a domestic worker, and his father as the personal driver of the Park patriarch.

OPINION:

The way in which the appearance of this subject destabilizes the bourgeois order makes us think as much of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Theorem, with the figure of the handsome young man who destroys the harmony of a wealthy family, as in The Servant, by Joseph Losey, with his claustrophobic portrait of how a butler ended up subduing his master. Here the acid radiography of the family institution is formulated from the satirical, the cartoonish, and ends up leading to a wild dissection of the class struggle.

With the title of the film it could be evident that it is about this poor family that takes advantage of a rich family, but as you delve into the plot you will notice of certain characters that play the role of “Parasites” are appearing and that in the end It's not the Kim who are precisely the harvesters, in fact if you think about the Park and how their position at the top prevents them from seeing the real problems of society, or how they are unable to perform the simplest tasks of the house but on the contrary, they have someone to do it for them. Would they not then be the greatest “Parasites” in this story?

Bong Joon-ho hid in his movie more than one meaning. The main one is undoubtedly the criticism of the economic model that is almost impossible to change. If Ki-woo's plan is literally interpreted, this is nothing more than a daydream as the last shot of him ending his letter in the basement shows.

But if there has been anything so far Parasite taught us, it's that everything can go from "good" to "terrible" in no time, especially when it comes to dreams. Ki-woo has ideas and promises that sound good in his head, but the really complicated thing comes when he gets to the practice of it.

I recommend this film 100%, you have a lot of content to digest and criticize. Let me know in the comments your opinion and if you enjoy it.

Here is the Trailer:

XOXO Li.