Parasite

Year 13, Day 1 - 1/1/21 - Movie #3,701

BEFORE: Happy New Year 2021 - come on, really nothing has changed just because we got to the end of a calendar and we have to hang up a new one.  Such delineations are purely arbitrary, except for that they bring about a little bit of hope that things will get better, we promise to try a little harder than we did last year to accomplish certain goals, and it's perhaps a time for quiet reflection as we gather together the loved ones in our home bubble unit and remember how we used to go out and party on New Year's Eve or have brunch in a real restaurant on New Year's Day.  Maybe we can get back to that sometime in the future, only at the rate that Americans have been vaccinating people, it's going to take ten years to reach herd immunity, unless the next administration can find a way to speed up the process.  Given all the log jams in Congress, please pencil yourself in for a New Year's brunch reservation in 2031 - see you then.

My countdown moves on to Year 13, and you might be asking, "Why start the year here?"  Sure, I could have kept the chain going, and watched "On the Rocks" with Bill Murray and Rashida Jones carrying over from "A Very Murray Christmas", which then could have taken me to "City of Ember" or "The Limits of Control" (another Jim Jarmusch film) - but I've established a pattern in the past.  New Year, new movie chain.  Anyway, January 1 is a great time therefore to program a "One-linkable" film (not un-linkable) - this is a film that links to only one other film I've been tracking.  To keep a chain going all year, I need, mostly, films that link to (at least) two other films I know and have not seen.  But I can burn off a one-linkable as the first or last film of the year.

When I realized "Parasite" was such a film, something that won the Best Picture Oscar for 2019 - not to mention the Palme d'Or at Cannes, except I just did - that's an opportunity I can't pass up.  But wait, is there a way to get from here to THERE, THERE being the start of the romance chain on February 1.  Well, of course, I mean, there probably is, I just have to find it.  Which I already did - in fact I found two ways to get there from here, the two paths have a lot of the same DNA, they just have 6 different films between Jan. 15 and Jan. 31.  I just have to lock one of those paths down. 

Also, this is traditionally the time I dedicate the year to someone (usually an actor) no longer with us, who departed this plane in calendar year 2020.  So many solid choices, especially since this pandemic has not been kind, but I'm going to single out Swedish actor Max Von Sydow, who probably first came to my attention playing Jesus in "The Greatest Story Ever Told", but I first really took notice up as the Brewmaster in "Strange Brew", since I was really into SCTV and the characters Bob & Doug McKenzie when I was 14 - and I wasn't even a beer drinker yet!  Then when I got to college and found out about Woody Allen movies, I really enjoyed "Hannah and Her Sisters", and he was in that movie too!  And then when the "Star Wars" sequel trilogy started up in 2015 with "The Force Awakens", he made it in there as Lor San Tekka.  This is a man whose life went through many stages, and he got his start in Ingmar Bergman films back in Sweden in the 1950's - and many of those are on my watchlist for January, so I'll be seeing a lot of Max Von Sydow very soon.

This seems like an impossible schedule for January - I'm going to start with a Korean film, somehow link to 5 films from Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, and get back to Hollywood films in time for February?  Yep, and I'm also going to throw in the Swedish "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" trilogy to make it extra difficult - and the two Swedish sections DO NOT share any actors!  So I've come to the conclusion that I must be insane - but this is what's going down.  Stay tuned to see how it's all going to come together

THE PLOT: Greed and class discrimination threaten the newly formed symbiotic relationship between the wealthy Park family and the destitute Kim clan. 

AFTER: Well, once the linking's been worked out and I know everything's going to come together, the only thing left to do is watch the damn film.  This one's on Hulu, which makes that quite easy, only for some reason after making sure that the English subtitles were working, Hulu decided that I also needed to see Spanish subtitles, which could NOT be turned off.  So I had to listen to this film in Korean, read the English subtitles, and ignore the Spanish ones.  Overly distracting - but I muddled through. 

In many ways, though this film could not possibly have addressed the COVID-19 pandemic directly in advance, this felt like the perfect metaphor for our times.  Even in Korea, it seems, there are two distinct classes of people, an upper and a lower, and while one family lives in a large house, designed by a famous architect, with a live-in housekeeper and a chauffeur on staff, another family lives in cramped quarters in a semi-basement apartment, toiling at odd jobs like folding stacks of pizza boxes.  Late in the film there's a heavy rainfall, and while to the rich family this is a mere inconvenience, it floods the poor family's basement apartment with sewage water, and their toilet backs up to make the problem even worse.  If you take the rainfall as a metaphor for COVID-19, there's some significance there - a richer family with health insurance can probably afford adequate care and the best medications, but millions of Americans don't have insurance, or have lost it during this crisis due to unemployment, so they're up the creek.  

But I'm getting away from the plot of "Parasite" - when the teenage son of the poorer family gets a chance to tutor the daughter of the rich family in speaking English (it only takes a few forged documents for him to pose as a registered college student, and his sister happens to be good with Photoshop), he gets a chance to see how the other half lives, in that giant architect-designed house with the live-in housekeeper.  He sees that the rich family's son is somewhat spoiled, and has some kind of ADD or ADHD, so he subtly tells the boy's mother that he happens to know a famous art therapist who can help the boy, channel his agressive energy into art, and of course he's thinking about his sister, without letting on that's his sister.  What's better than earning one income from this family is earning two incomes from this family.

Once his sister's in place, she takes steps to have the family's driver fired, thinking that she could probably pretend to remember her family's old chauffeur and how to contact him, and get her own father installed as their driver under another fake name.  Earning three incomes from the rich family is better than two, right?  Then the only thing left to do is to get the current housekeeper fired, and then the entire poor family will be employed by the rich family, they'll earn four incomes and maybe move out of their terrible apartment.  

I sort of thought I knew where this was going - from all the things I've heard about this film, I figured that at some point the poor family would just kill the rich family and that would be it, they'd just live in their nice big house.  Wow, I was so wrong, the film doesn't go that way, I guess that wouldn't work anyway because eventually somebody would wonder why the kids didn't show up for school or the father didn't go to work, and the authorities would investigate.  I don't want to say here what DOES happen instead, but as you might imagine, at some point the scheme falls apart.  This is the way, it's always been the way.  If you thought that the poor family's situation would just improve, and they'd keep this scheme running for years, and everything would work out for the best, well, then you just don't get how movies work.  

To me, this felt something like a Korean Coen Brothers movie - and I think that analogy works, because did the kidnapping scheme work out well in "Fargo"?  No, of course it did not.  Did the baby-napping scheme work out well in "Raising Arizona"?  No, of course it did not.  "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" "The Ladykillers"?  "The Big Lebowski"?  At some point, something's bound to go wrong, and a chain reaction will take place, and all the trains are going to run off the rails, it's almost a given.  

But hey, if you want to skip the last hour of this film, maybe you can do that and pretend that everything's going to be OK - but you'd only be fooling yourself.  The fundamental laws of the universe demand that everything's going to lean toward entropy.  Despite our best efforts, someday we'll use up all the natural resources of our planet, and at some point after that, even the sun will die out.  Of course we should wake up every day and fight the good fight, struggle for the legal tender and then lay our bodies down.  And when the morning light comes streaming in, we get up and do it again.  Amen.  But somewhere in the back of our lizard brains there's that little voice saying that it's all for naught, because eventually your clock runs out, and then what have you got to show for it all?  Dangerous thinking, sure, because it leads to considering shortcuts to getting ahead, as seen here.  Or maybe there are vague plans on how to be successful and buy that big house, but with no practical path from here to there.  

Often it seems like there's no way to beat the system except to cheat the system.  Discuss. This Korean family decides to cheat the system, and perhaps they learn that there are no real shortcuts that work.  Discuss.  Actions have consquences. Discuss.  Is this the perfect film to watch while you're stuck in your own house or apartment during a pandemic?  Discuss.  

Look, there's a lot I don't understand about Korean culture.  I don't get the thing about the scholar's stone, or why so many of them want to learn English or take on American names like Kevin or Nathan.  I didn't know they have Cub Scouts in Korea, or are fascinated by Native American culture.  But none of that really matters to the story in the end.  

Starring Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Lee Jeong-eun, Jang Hye-jin, Park Myung-hoon, Jung Ji-so, Jung Hyeon-jun, Park Keun-rok, Park Seo-joon.

RATING: 7 out of 10 plates of sliced fresh fruit