Parasite: The new era of cinema

By: Mark Slovik (03/12/2020)

This 2020 is an historic year for the film industry, as it represents the end of the great filmographic monopoly: this year, the door of the industry is finally opened to thousands of new possibilities. This moment is historic, because for the first time, Hollywood didn’t win.

Last February 9, on a Sunday, in the city of Los Angeles, California, the ninety-second (92nd) Oscar Awards ceremony was held, organized by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is the most prestigious and most valued ceremony in the film industry. The ceremony celebrates the biggest distinctions of the year in the industry, from categories such as best film, the best director and best actors, to categories such as best documentary, best short film, best editing, among others. The whole situation revolves around what happened that night, since for the first time in history, an unexpected event happened that moved the entire industry and established new rules in the game: Parasite, a South Korean film with the language from the country, won the award of best film, being the first foreign film to ever do so, thus breaking the Hollywood monopoly that had been there since the beginning of the industry as such, and declaring that the film industry is not only located in the United States, but that there is much more potential scattered all over the world.

Parasite is definitely a unique movie in many ways: The fact that it is international stands out a lot, but taking that out of the equation, it is still a movie with many aspects that stand out among all the 2019 movies and the industry in general. The direction and script writing, both performed by Bong Joon Ho (director of films like "Snowpiercer" and "Okja"), are exceptional, and have an impressive level of detail and work, that help move the story forward and give it a magical touch, showing how precise and thoroughly well-thought this movie was; the music has an effect in which it floats you throughout the story, and makes you feel the right emotions at the right times; the story is just brutal, it's magical, as it makes you laugh, almost cry, scare you, make you feel sorry, terrified, remorseful, and manages to make a lasting impact beyond the movie theater, really resonating with you and making you question and identify yourself in it; the cinematography has an impressive precision, which makes the story flow much better and have a fuller and deeper meaning, giving tons of symbolism in every shot by hidden objects and tiny details that leave a deeper meaning to the entirety of the film; And finally, the message is brutal, because it creates a social criticism as realistic as it can be reached, and a parallelism with how the lives of different social levels work, which was identifiable around the world, making a high impact, and proving that regardless of the country, societies behave the same, and social behaviors are equal no matter where.

The first thing as a whole that I loved about the movie, is that it doesn’t have anything special: not effects, not sophisticated techniques, not even a drop of innovation filmwise, but that “lack of creativity and change” is what makes it an amazing movie, because it uses all the simple screenwriting, directing and cinematography tools, tips and tricks that everyone part of the industry knows, but it uses them at perfection, something that is rarely seen today, and that becomes more than enough. At the beginning of the movie every shot is on a straight angle or pointing downwards, making the characters feel inferiors, but when Kim Ki-woo, of Kevin, as you prefer, goes to the house for the first time, the angle of the camera rises, from pointing down to pointing up, making him feel powerful, in control, arriving at a new, better stage of his life. Another example is the symbolism of the lines, because there’s always a line dividing the poor from the rich, and just a few times one of the sides crosses it. The last example I’m going to give is the stairs, and how the team uses them to show if they are rising to a better place or going down to a worse one, from the house to the basement, from the sub-basement to the house. This movie proves that there’s not always a need to innovate, that if there isn’t a real purpose to do things different, you shouldn’t, and that rules, followed at perfection, can achieve a masterpiece worthy of worship.

The other thing that I think is great in this movie is the message, about the class struggles, the big socioeconomic gap there is everywhere, and how the same things affect different groups in different ways. The part where it starts raining, and for the poor part it becomes a natural disaster that destroys their homes and lives them sleeping with hundreds of other families in a school gym, while for the rich is actually a good thing because it cleans the pollution, really shows how we live in completely different worlds than other parts of society, regardless that we are only a few blocks away. Also the fact that the Park family never looked down, and that’s why many parts of the plan didn’t go sideways, proves how the upper class doesn’t care about what’s beneath them. These messages, as simple as they sound, resonated all around the world, and that’s why the movie became so popular, because it doesn’t just speak truths about South-Korean society, it speaks truths about humanity as a whole.

Summing everything up, Parasite is an amazing movie with many achievements in different areas, and it’s a movie that made movies because it showed how international films are also good. To close, I want to quote Bong Joon Ho himself, from his Golden Globes acceptance speech for Best International Film: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films”. So go and watch movies from countries you've never even heard of, because I can guarantee that you’ll find amazing pieces of art.