Bong has been residing a charmed life since May, when Parasite gained the Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Other pageant appearances adopted, then the US launch. In the final couple of months, he and the solid have been touring with the movie. And Hollywood can’t appear to get sufficient of them. Parasite has snapped up critics’ circle and guild awards throughout the nation, the line “Jessica, solely little one, Illinois, Chicago” is a uncommon cinephile meme, it has gained a Golden Globe for finest non-English movie, and garnered an unprecedented six Oscar nominations, for finest image, director, worldwide function movie, authentic screenplay, enhancing and manufacturing design.
What lies behind Hollywood’s crush on Bong? It is partly due to the sort of movies he makes—ostensibly “style motion pictures”, slick, humorous, not alienatingly overseas or arty. His darkly comedian tone was in place from his first function, Barking Dogs NeverBite (2000). It was his second movie, although, which introduced him to the world as an unusual expertise. Memories Of Murder (2003) is predicated on an precise case (in the information lately for lastly being solved) of a serial killer in late 1980s South Korea. Bong’s caustic tone and command over compositional pressure increase it far above an ordinary procedural. Had he directed Mother (2009) subsequent, he might need been pegged as the Korean David Fincher, however he swerved as an alternative, directing a delirious and distinctive creature function, The Host (2006).
Still, Hollywood has solely opened its arms to Bong as a result of it knew him from earlier than. After 4 movies in South Korea, he directed Snowpiercer (2013) in English; it had an American star, Chris Evans, in the lead, and was distributed there by The Weinstein Company. His subsequent, Okja (2017), was in English and Korean, produced by Netflix and Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Neither was fairly as good as his Korean movies, but it’s unlikely Parasite would have been having fun with the similar success in the event that they hadn’t occurred.
Last yr, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, in Mixtec and Spanish, was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and gained for director, overseas movie and cinematography. Taken collectively, Roma and Parasite is perhaps taken as an indication of the Academy’s more and more open perspective to overseas cinema (although Roma was produced by Netflix, making it at the least a bit American). While it’s true that they’re letting a choose few in via the door now, the similar caveat utilized in Cuarón’s case as Bong’s. He has directed extra English movies than Mexican ones, together with a giant franchise function (Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban) and a finest director Oscar-winner (Gravity). By the time he got here round to creating his intensely private black and white movie, Hollywood noticed Cuarón as considered one of them, not some intimidating overseas genius.
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Park So-dam and Choi Woo-shik in scenes from ‘Parasite’.
Parasite opens with the Kims, a household of 4—Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin) and their kids, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) and Ki-jung (Park So-dam)—of their one-room “semi-basement”. It’s a cramped, hardscrabble existence, but the Kims are all talented hustlers, and Ki-woo has a plan. First, he gets a job at a mansion tutoring a wealthy couple’s daughter. He then lays the ground for his sister to work with the couple’s young son (the scene where Ki-jung, entirely unqualified, sells the boy’s mother on “art therapy” is a comic book gem). Soon, all 4 are working underneath the similar artistically designed roof, pretending to have by no means met one another.
Just watching these 4 run rings round their shallow employers would have made for a humorous, acidic variation on the residence invasion thriller. But the movie, like Ki-woo, has a grand plan. The mansion’s authentic housekeeper, Gook Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun), who was eliminated after an elaborate scheme by the interlopers, turns up on a stormy night time. In a breathtakingly darkish reveal, it seems her husband has been residing beneath the constructing, in a basement the house owners by no means go to. His spouse sneaks him meals as soon as per week—a provide that was reduce off when she was fired. Now she is aware of their secret, they know hers, and Bong begins tightening the screws. All six are sympathetic characters however do horrible issues—there’s no room for niceties when you’re at the backside of the societal chain. And so Parasite goes from a darkish comedy about class to a horror movie about class warfare.
Parasite is finest thought of in a double invoice with one other gorgeous Korean movie. Lee Chang-dong is a really totally different movie-maker from Bong, elliptical and poetic somewhat than wickedly sensible, however Burning (2018) is as devastating a take a look at class divisions as Parasite. When a younger girl disappears, her former classmate (and briefly, her lover), a solidly center-class author, turns into obsessive about the concept that her final boyfriend, a wealthy Gatsby-like aesthete, is one way or the other accountable. Both movies explode into surprising violence, which means that even sensibilities as far aside as Bong and Lee reached the similar conclusion: The class conflict, when it comes, shall be ugly and messy, and the aspect that’s extra determined will prevail.
A few months earlier than Bong’s movie gained the 2019 Palme d’Or, the finest image Oscar went to Green Book, a movie even American critics needed to admit was horrible. Parasite might solely be in with the slimmest of possibilities on Oscar night time, nevertheless it’s virtually inconceivable that two movies with such a gulf in artistry could possibly be up for, not to mention win, the similar award. Year after yr, a bunch of serviceable American movies and a number of standouts are pitted towards one another and the movie world pretends the dialogue is about honouring the better of the yr. Yet, hardly a yr goes by when the finest movie isn’t made exterior America and England.
South Korean movie has modified the language of world cinema in the final 20 years, particularly in its method to style cinema (although there’s additionally the auteurist improvements of Kim Ki-duk and Hong Sang-soo). Three-four of the finest-identified administrators working in world cinema right this moment are from there. Yet, Parasite is the first South Korean movie to ever be nominated for an Academy award. It’s a measure of how even the overseas language class of the Oscars misses whole seismic shifts in world cinema.
Every yr, there are nameless reviews of Academy voters skipping non-English movies as a result of they don’t wish to maintain monitor of subtitles. Upon successful for finest non-English movie at the Golden Globes in January, Bong instructed the viewers via a translator: “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of overseas language subtitles, you can be launched to so many extra wonderful movies.” The Oscars want Bong greater than he wants them.
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