Crevices and layers, like a rock

Like a lot of modern filmmakers, Bong Joon-ho isn't deterred by the constraints of genre. You can go into a film thinking it's a comedy or a thriller or a sociological drama and come out of it thinking that it was very different than what you expected. The real talent is in making something that crosses multiple genre lines and still has a consistently told story. Parasite, Joon-ho's latest, takes those three listed approaches and effortlessly blends them into something greater. It's a multi-layered film, with several themes all competing for prominence at the same time, with characters weaving in and out of the story's varied angles and adding something more to it in every frame. It won the Palm d'Or at Cannes this year and I can easily see why.

The most obvious themes are those of class differences and differing expectations. The Kim family have been struggling for some time, at least in part because the family patriarch, Ki-taek, doesn't have a clear plan as to how to move forward. Lacking that plan, he's imparted his own method of skirting the edges to both his wife and his children. They're all essentially grifters; feeding off the naiveté and obliviousness of Korea's upper crust who are only too happy to hire others to do the things that they don't want to dirty their hands with and are otherwise completely ignorant of the lives and mindsets of those they employ.

But that's where the parallels start. The wealthy Parks never consider that they might be completely taken advantage of by their hired help because of their unwillingness to take responsibility for the impact that their decisions have on those around them: their staff, their children, etc. They don't think ahead to where they're going. They simply subsist in the very comfortable stasis that they currently occupy. Similarly, when the Kims finally put another scheme into place, there's no thought about how to use that advantage to plan for the future. It's all about what they can get away with right now. This is clearly a group of highly intelligent people with great awareness of how society functions, but they don't look past the concept of feeding off what's left to them by the wealthier set. An easy contrast can be drawn between Ki-woo and the friend who found him his position with the Parks, Min-hyuk, who was playing tutor while attending university for a prospective career.

However, that's also an indication of difference in expectations. The Kims are jaded. They don't expect things to change for them and, thus, seek to survive on what's immediately available. At one point, a casual reference to "500 university graduates applying for a security guard position" is a good summation of why they think like they do and why their employment motivations are more centered around grifting than taking the presumed normal way out of their basement apartment. What finally pushes Ki-taek over the edge into a, uh, different approach is finally getting to hear his bosses in a situation that's not one manipulated by him. This is when the subtle bigotry about the "subway people", followed by the reality that what little they had has been washed away in a flood, makes him decide to leave society behind; perhaps in the hope that his family will do better off without him, as they might be forced to make a plan of their own, rather than following his absence of one.

Bong is aided in his effort by excellent work by his cast; the most notable of which is Park So-dam as Ki-taek's daughter, Ki-jeong. Her almost literally commanding performance as an art therapist is both intimidating and hilarious and it feels almost like there was more to be mined there that may have ended up dying in the edits. Jang Hye-jin, as Chung-sook, also had a wonderfully complex role that she breathes life into. While clearly a domineering personality and the one member of the family who has tasted the prospective "big time" as a silver medalist in the hammer throw, she provides the overall spine to the group, but still defers to Ki-taek when it comes to actual organization. It's a nice examination of cultural and family dynamics at work and she treads the middle line between officer and soldier quite well. That kind of water-treading nature also becomes evident when Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) and his wife, Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), find themselves alone, with kids asleep or outside and, thus, presented with the opportunity for a sexual encounter which they resolve solely by masturbating each other through their clothes. They, too, are unable to break the roles that they've adopted, despite the seeming freedom to do otherwise.

Bong details this fairly complex sociological tale with a good dose of humor ("Why would you screw in my seat? Why cross the line like that?") and a willingness to enter the realm of what many American moviegoers would consider bizarre. The broadly humorous note is that these highly intelligent and canny people all believe that their change in fortune is driven by a rock that Min-hyuk handed off to them before he left for the States. It's a great example of how even the most hardwired operators can depend on nebulous concepts like luck in determining how their plans play out. I think the film overall was a good step forward from Snowpiercer; a film with similar and similarly complex themes which stuck too closely to the Western tradition of storytelling and, thus, didn't really deliver. Parasite, on the other hand, succeeded wildly.