Parasite

In 2019, Parasite became the first foreign language film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture*. It also won the Oscars for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Film — and the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Unsurprisingly it also became the most recent film to break into Sight & Sound magazine’s 2022 Greatest Films of All Time top 100. Which is why Parasite is doing double duty, featuring in our Bong 1-7 retrospective and kicking off this year’s new series of Pantheon.

It makes a lot of sense that it would be Bong who would spearhead this breakthrough. He’s never made a secret of his admiration for American movies (Jaws, Signs and The Thing were all mentioned when he was talking about The Host), and the Hitchcockian Parasite came on the back of two international productions, Snowpiercer and Okja. In other words, subtitled or not, his cinematic language is easily assimilated in North America.

Still, as anyone who has seen those movies knows, his sensibility is quirkier, more satirical and provocative than mainstream commercial cinema typically allows. Parasite is predicated on a critique of class inequality. The Kims, a poor family of four, reside in a cramped basement apartment where they struggle to make ends meet, stealing nearby Wi-Fi signals and folding pizza boxes for a delivery joint to make money under the table. Sick of their underclass existence, they set their sights on the Parks, a rich family looking for an English tutor for their teenaged daughter. The crafty Kims plot and scheme, and soon infiltrate the affluent home one-by-one, each of them manipulating their way into household gigs without the Parks realizing that they’re related. However, once they’re settled in, things don’t go according to plan.

Bong contrasts and skewers these two family units while casting a critical gaze at the system that pits them against one another. Darkly funny and palpably urgent, Parasite is a universal tale of economic disparity, social polarization, and human desperation that does not fit conveniently into any one simple category: it is a satire, tragedy, and allegory all at once and not least a supreme entertainment.

Tuesday’s Parasite screening will be the black & white version.

Jan 19: Intro by Ji-yoon An, Assistant Professor of Modern Korean Popular Culture at UBC

Trained in film studies with a focused attention on Korea, An is a scholar of Korean Studies with an interest in cultural trends and flows. An received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge. Her current book project examines family representations in Korean cinema.

Brilliant and deeply unsettling… Bong’s command of the medium is thrilling […] the movie’s greatness isn’t a matter of his apparent ethics or ethos — he’s on the side of decency — but of how he delivers truths, often perversely and without an iota of self-serving cant. The slapstick becomes more violent, the stakes more naked, the laughs more terrifying and cruel.

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

What makes Parasite the movie of the year — what might make Bong the filmmaker of the century — is the way it succeeds in being at once fantastical and true to life, intensely metaphorical and devastatingly concrete.

AO Scott, New York Times