After Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning” was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year, this year’s “Parasite,” directed by Bong Joon-ho, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
In recent years, with the release of great Korean films such as Miss, Walking with God, Busan, Burning, The Conjuring, and Wicked, Korean cinema has surpassed even Hollywood’s mass-produced trappings in my mind.
The Koreans are always capable of taking old themes and making them new; Parasite focuses on the gap between rich and poor and uses elements such as mansions and secret rooms and indiscriminate killing.
How will director Bong Joon-ho interpret these themes and elements, which have already been filmed to death, into a movie experience that will give the audience sweaty palms and goose bumps?
1
The main character Kim Ki-woo’s family lives in a semi-basement.
What kind of concept is a semi-basement?
The windows were above the road, the toilets were positioned close to the roof, and there were always drunken men pissing in front of their windows.
Kim Ki-woo’s father, mother, and sister are all unemployed, and the family lives mainly by folding pizza boxes.
The family had to scrounge up WiFi to get information because they couldn’t afford the cell phone bill, and they had to sell all the folded pizza boxes before they could eat a meal.
But the life of this poor family soon came to an end.
A good friend introduced Kim Ki-woo to President Park, the owner of an IT company, as a tutor.
In his first lesson, Kim Ki-woo won the favor of President Park’s daughter Da-hye and the approval of President Park’s wife, Yeon-jo, by pretending to be extremely realistic, and became a tutor for the Soho family.
After that, Kim Ki-woo introduces his sister, Kim Ki-jung, as a drawing teacher to Da-hye’s brother, Da-song.
With Ki-jung’s help, he also made his father, Kim Ki-taek, become President Park’s driver.
Finally, with the help of Ki-woo, Ki-ting, and Ki-taek, her mother, Chung-sook, became the housekeeper of President Park’s family.
The four members of the family went from being unemployed to being the teacher, driver, and housekeeper of President Park’s family, and became the parasites of President Park’s family.
The first half of the movie is mainly a comedy to show the poor family’s cleverness in pretending and acting.
At the same time, it also gives the audience a feeling that.
The innocent, kind, and generous rich man is deceived by the cunning poor man.
2
After reading this, someone on Douban harshly criticized: How can the rich be so gullible?
In this game, the rich and the poor are just cheating each other, and both think that they are the winners.
After Kim Ki-woo’s first lesson with Dae-hye, the dame Lian-jo wants to pay his salary.
She had already counted the wads of money, but pulled out a few more at the last minute, which means she wants to pay him less.
However, when explaining to Ki-woo, she said, “I wanted to pay the same hourly rate as Ms. Min-hyuk, but considering the price increase, I raised the hourly rate.”
The rich may be generous with their money, but that doesn’t mean they are stupid, and they are also careful with their finances.
3
The transition from being a homeless person to having a job for the whole family has completely changed Kim Ki-woo’s self-confidence.
When he first encountered someone urinating in front of his window, he was too shy to stop him.
Now, when he met a drunkard urinating in front of his window again, he immediately picked up a stone and went to talk to the drunkard.
While President Park took his wife and kids on a camping trip, Kim Ki-woo’s family opened up and drank in a clean and tidy mansion as if it were their own home.
From hell to heaven, under the influence of wine, father Kim Ki-taek began to assume that this was his home.
As the head of the family, rendered by the wine, Ki-taek Kim floats to the clouds.
In the future, the family will be the family of the son, Kim Ki-woo, who hooked up with President Park’s daughter, Dae-hye. Even if it’s not a family, it’s no different from the one you’re living in now anyway. The whole family was drinking wine together, and it was so cozy.
Until his wife brought him back to reality: “Cozy, you think it’s cozy, don’t you? Well, if President Park were to suddenly return, you would immediately hide like a cockroach, wouldn’t you? Children, you know that if you turn on the lights in the middle of the night in your house, all the cockroaches will immediately go into hiding.”
A cockroach is a parasite that lives in its owner’s house and eats the owner’s food, but it cannot be seen by the owner, or it will be trampled to death.
The entire disguise of Kim Ki-taek’s family is like a cockroach that cannot be exposed to President Park’s eyes.
Even with the seriousness of the disguise, Kim Ki-woo’s family discovered one thing when they got along with President Park’s family: they were being treated like cockroaches.
4
You have a smell!
President Park said while talking to his wife, “Kim Ki-taek smells like raisins after a long time, and I can smell it sometimes when I’m riding the subway.”
President Park treats Kim Ki-woo’s family with kindness and respect on the surface, but deep down he despises them.
Kim Ki-taek hides under the table and sniffs his clothes, then closes his eyes in pain, but can’t act out.
These shots really hit me!
In the summer of my sophomore year of college, I went to tutor a sophomore in high school in a rich area near the Qiantang River in Hangzhou, an hour away by subway.
One time I went to his room and saw that there was no stool for me to sit on, so I sat on his bed.
He suddenly turned on me and shouted, “Is this where you sit?”
When I was scolded by a child, I had to stand up awkwardly, blushing and not making a scene.
Was it because I was also riding the subway and he thought I was dirty and smelly?
President Park has a sense of class in his heart that he and Kim Ki-taek are two classes of people, so he cannot cross the line.
For example, when Kim Ki-taek as a friend asks President Park, “You must love your wife very much, right?”
President Park paused for a moment, then smirked, and finally said with a steely expression, “Of course, I love her.”
In President Park’s mind, Kim Ki-taek had crossed the line, the line of rank.
You and I have a master-servant relationship, not a friend relationship.
If President Park has a strong sense of hierarchy because he is the boss of the company, then what about the kind and innocent Mistress Joan?
When Kim Ki-taek offered to shake hands with Jo Jo, she asked awkwardly and politely, “Well, did you wash your hands?”
A servant, after all, is a servant, dirty.
5
In the eyes of President Park and his wife, there is a hierarchy between the servants and themselves, but is it really true that only the servants are dirty and smelly?
Kim Ki-taek, who seemed to smell something when he drove Liam Jo home, put his finger to his nostrils and frowned at Kim Ki-taek, who was driving.
However, her own behavior did not seem elegant: she placed her bare feet on the back of the seat, just behind Kim Ki-taek’s head.
The filth of the body is only on the surface, but the filth of the soul is the real filth.
I believe that both rich and poor people have a place in their hearts where they don’t want others to see the filth.
Kim Ki-jung took off her panties and put them in the car when Yoon drove her home so that her father could be her driver.
She is also a member of the group.
The couple is furious that Yoon’s driver is a shameful man, and they wonder if Yoon’s girlfriend is a drug addict for leaving her panties in the car.
The couple says that it is morally wrong to do such things as cheating and taking drugs.
However, when they are alone, President Park asks his wife if she still has the cheap panties and how excited she would be if she wore them.
And the wife responds, “Buy me drugs!”
One also wants to have an affair in his car, and one wants to try drugs.
The rich are dirty too!
There is a shocking line in the movie: “Money is the iron that flattens everything!”
Money is still the ladder that allows the rich to climb to the moral high ground and accuse the poor of being stinky and dirty.
6
by Kang Jung yeon / photo by Kim Gang yoo] Kim Ki-taek expressed his emotion after his whole family became employees of President Park’s family, saying, “His wife is very simple and kind, and she is rich and kind.
She said, “She is not ‘rich but kind’, but ‘rich and kind’.
Chung-sook thinks that if she had money, she would be kind, too.
But can money really determine whether a person is kind or not?
At the end of the movie, at the birthday party for Dosong, the husband of the former housekeeper, angry at his wife’s death, storms out of the basement and stabs Keating in the chest.
When Duo Song sees the assailant, he passes out on the spot.
One was unconscious, and the other had blood flowing from his chest like a small fountain.
President Park asked Kim Ki-taek to take his son to the hospital with his keys, but he didn’t care about Ki-tae who was bleeding on the floor.
President Park and his wife didn’t care about Ki-ting’s safety, and they didn’t even think to ask Kim Ki-taek to drive Ki-ting and Dae-sung to the hospital together.
People should only care about themselves, so what does it matter if others live or die?
However, Kim Ki-taek will care if the driver who left his job because of him finds a job.
But President Park doesn’t care about Kim Ki-jung who is bleeding and about to lose her life on the ground.
When President Park covered his nose and went to get the car keys that had fallen on the ground, the conflict erupted.
Kim Ki-taek raised his knife and stabbed President Park in the chest.
7
Back to the topic of this article: “Rich but Kind” or “Rich and Kind”?
I don’t think either is true!
For whether a person is inherently good or not does not depend on whether he is rich or not.
It is only that money can make the selfish rich man look benevolent and great, and the poor poor man stink and be deceitful.
Money is the iron, which can iron everything out.
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