Winner of the 2019 Palme D’ Or
prize as Best Picture at the Cannes Film Festival, “Parasite” takes place in modern
South Korea revolving around a story line of two distinct; could not be more polar opposite families.
In family number one you see the Park Family; the picture of both aspirational
and achieved wealth and financial success. Family number two is the Kim Family;
far from wealthy but very rich in street smarts and not much else at all. Be it
chance or fate, these two houses are brought together and the Kim’s sense a
golden opportunity. Masterminded by their teenage college-aged son Ki-woo, the
Kim children expediently install themselves as a fake tutor and a fake art
therapist, to the Parks teenage daughter and adolescent son.
After a short period of time a
very meticulously symbiotic relationship begins to form between the two
families largely predicated on the Kim’s keeping up their fake personas all the
time almost 24/7. The Kim’s beginning to provide the Parks the
"indispensable" luxury services typically associated to the wealthy
while the Parks obliviously naively bankroll the Kim’s entire household not knowing
they are grifting frauds. But as the old adage goes, “the best-laid plans of
mice and men often go awry” - no matter how carefully planned, something may
still go wrong with it. And thus an unanticipated event threatens the Kim’s'
newfound comfort. Once destitute but no longer the Kim’s engage in a savage,
underhanded battle that threatens to destroy the fragile balance of symbiotic need
between the Kim’s and the Parks.
REVIEW: Listed
as a drama mystery “Parasite” but is is so much brilliantly more. It is charming, funny, always
clever and on occasion adroitly hilarious. Ultimately “Parasite is a masterful stealthy
crafted tale of modern grifting through the filter of class greed and class
discrimination. It also showed how the qualities that sometimes associated
with people of wealth such as ingenuity, ambition and desire eventually wain as they now are inclined to easily fall victim to being more gullible, lazy, childish and naive when their financial success is achieved. Likewise the
poor and the destitute can sometimes be equally inclined to being driven and ambitions to achieving their lifelong dreams by how more desperate their
poverty conditions affect them.
There is both a poetic beginning and
Shakespeare ending to this film’s story overall arc. A richly developed story that at times is directed
with near perfection by Bong Joon Ho. Nothing ever gets lost in the 2:15 minute
running time subtitled film as each characters motives are easily understood for
the theater viewer to fully appreciate and enjoy. But more so from its first minute to its climatic ending this is simply a very smart,
witty and thoughtful film that defies being limited to specific cultural
boundaries. It would not surprise me in five years someone in Hollywood will adapt
a similar screenplay with an American family in mind to telling this story.
It’s just that original and surprisingly good.
"Oh, what a Korean tangled
web we weave, when first we practice to deceive". For me “Parasite” is
clearly one of the five best films you will see in 2019.
4:00 Stars
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