A HOUSE DIVIDED
AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL, WHERE BONG JOON-HO’S Parasite won the Palme d’Or, the director asked critics not to reveal anything about the film past the initial setup. One of the joys of going to festivals is that you can discover movies without noisy criticism getting in the way of your own first impression. So fair warning: if you want to replicate that experience, don’t read this piece until you’ve seen Parasite, because I’m going to give a great deal of the game away. It’s too extraordinary a film to dance around.
Late in the twisty, class-warfare family tragicomedy that is , Ki-taek, the head of a family of four that never had much and now has lost every bit of that, is lying on his back on the floor of a crowded shelter, next to his wife, Chung-sook; his son, Ki-woo; and his daughter, Ki-jung. Ki-woo asks his father what he plans to do, and Ki-taek responds that he has no plan, and then, without turning his head—his broad face almost filling the frame—he closes his eyes and slowly covers them with his forearm. Ki-taek is played by Song Kang-ho, a Korean box-office (2003); the father desperate to save his daughter from the Han River lair of a giant amphibious mutant in (2006); the taciturn rebellion leader who sacrifices his life in the hopes of freeing his daughter from the mobile concentration camp in (2013)—all have plans, no matter how risky and ill-conceived they might be. The gesture that Ki-taek makes suggests total despair, and as we soon see, an abdication of any rational resistance to the rage and resentment that overwhelm him. All of Bong’s films find cause with the marginalized, the abused, and the oppressed without sentimentalizing or heroizing them. But is the first of his films to offer no hope of any lasting change. In that sense, takes off from a moment near the end of (2017), which begins as a charming fairy tale about a young girl on a journey to save her companion animal, a giant pig, only to land her in an abattoir, ankle-deep in blood. The fairy tale is over, as takes off the genre gloves and becomes a protest of one of the pillars of capitalism: factory farming.
