Cinema (by M. Cabona). Parasite, the war between the poor told by Bong Joon-ho

The Parasite poster

An apparently unpolitical version of the class struggle, the small delinquency fascinates and inspires Italian cinema as much after the war (bike thieves, Guards and thieves, The bin…), how much in the 70s (Ugly dirty and bad). Now the cinema of the Far East is fascinated and the juries of the last two Cannes Festivals have awarded the Golden Palm in 2018 the Japanese Family business of Hirokazu Kore-eda and in 2019 the South Korean Parasite by Bong Joon-ho. Both tell of families who live by tricks with sometimes grotesque vicissitudes in countries that already in the last century have become economic powers.

To want to look back, the non-Italian archetypes of Parasite I'm Iron 3 by Kim Ki-duk and the recent Burning by Lee Chang-dong. In the finale of Parasite also echoes Funny Game by Michael Haneke. They are all festival films and all the work of directors more inclined than Bong Joon-on to take sides. Insensitive to the question of guilt, Bon Joon-ho considers, does not pity his wretches. His camera is the eye of an entomologist. He notes that those who are born poor perhaps deserve it, but also that those born rich must thank the case.

To face off in Parasite they are not classes far apart, but contiguous classes: the poor who are inclined to begging against the poor who are inclined to work. They are separated by the inability to sacrifice: when we are only parasites, although intelligent and planners, we do not go far.

More than the words of the dialogues, it is the furnishings that characterize the opposite family alignments. Few places, overcrowded with people and things, are the background of those who see the world from a basement window, where the air does not dissipate the hood of mold. Many local, little and well furnished, are the background of those who see the world from above, with the mediation of an English garden for the holidays and a luxury restaurant cellar, bordering – and here the shadow of the catastrophe – with the anti-nuclear shelter. It is the latter to have an unexpected role, a battlefield between those who lived in the semi-basement and those who fell deeper into the earth to have, at least, a mole existence.

The director could have given up about twenty minutes, where the same situation can be seen and seen again. But the public, especially the youth, of a film appreciates – as we have seen from the remarkable takings around the world – the quantity with respect to quality.

Happily choral work, Parasite offers the actors in the roles of the poor – superb the interpretation of the father offered by Song Kang-ho – the worst lines, which are the best, and the most exasperated situations, which instead rarely are. If you have indulgence for a circus comedy (the poor stumble often and willingly), if you don't imagine the ending from the first hour, you can understand why it's a gold palm film.

(Il Messaggero, Thursday 7 November 2019)

*Parasite*** 1/2

South Korea, dramatic, 132 '

Directed by Bong Joon-ho, Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-Shik, Hyae Jin-Chang, Park So-dam

@barbadilloit

By Maurizio Cabona