The Highest Stakes
COUPLE OF DAYS AFTER PREMIERED AT CANNES 2019, AND TWO days before it won the Palme d’Or, I sat down for a brief interview with the film’s director, Bong Joon-ho. is the film I most wanted to see on the big screens of the festival’s main theaters, the Lumière and the Debussy, with a combined international audience of nearly 3,400. There are no truly comparable theaters in New York in terms of size, luminous projection, and clarity of sound. While movie palaces are not a necessity for art films, Bong is one of the only contemporary filmmakers whose movies appeal to both art and mass film audiences. A scathing social satire that fuses raucous comedy with deep despair, is set in contemporary Seoul, where the enormous gap between the very rich and the very poor has become as untenable as it is in many countries including our own. The indifference of the former to the desperation of the latter has horrific consequences. Bong, who seemed pleased with the film’s reception, said that for the first time he felt that he was not simply working in established genres but that he had found his own form. I agree, was unanimous. ( will be released in the U.S. on October 11.)
