New : Parasite

Parasite Bong Joon-Ho is a demonic puzzle, abrasive, violent, which capsizes the hearts of spectators as much as it foils every cog in its scenario to make its twists an element of language that speaks as much to the social fiber of film than its attachment to genre cinema.

An extremely striking film of the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival 2019. Throughout the history of this family of proletarians, who would like to live the great life by the cunning and the irony of manipulation, it is a whole section of South Korean society that is dissected. Parasite, like Burning, the year before, sounds the alarm and distinguishes a country with social inequalities more and more displayed where the rich choose as they please who has a job or not.

This is a habit we can quickly spot in the filmmaker: this perpetual intention to want to break its momentum by a rupture of tones. In one sequence, the stakes can make us laugh from one second to another.

Without revealing anything, it is even the toughest and most violent scenes that are sometimes the funniest. And it’s the same for genres as the fluidity and coherence of editing and realization grip their subject: from thriller to survival, from camera to drama, from comedy to political satire, Parasite is a cinematographic maze on the infinite horizon.

This desire to record the horror of the situation and the torpor of the characters by a transposition of the burlesque never takes away the seriousness or the folly of the scenario. The architecture of each scene and each dialogue is made in such a way that the concern for social denunciation is through the prism of the genre and the bloody transposition to the image. As in Memories of Murder, Mother or even The Host, the cinema and the originality of its form are always at the service of a purpose.

Parasite is, let it be said, one of his director’s new feature films: a work that combines the recurring themes of the filmmaker – the hierarchy of society and social stratification – with a desire to play and to trim the bone to the marrow. We could take Parasite for a huge joke, a movie that would like to fall into the big puppet thanks to its satire and political reach but it goes beyond that.

Hard to say if the film will have the Palme d’Or but in any case, we give him the Palme of pleasure. A relentless pleasure because the adventure that the film offers us is like a kind of hectic rollercoaster that never stops and that makes its inventiveness live by its capacity to surprise its audience. During this Cannes Film Festival, and despite the high quality of the selection and other sections, we have come across many films that tried to delude us with their programmatic and schematic choices: Parasite is nothing all of this. But do not be fooled by the subject, the film does not only work by its ability to divert the side of its stakes.

The film is of surgical precision and as Wild Goose Lake, remains a piece of cinema that succeeds everything he undertakes as the depth of field of Parasite is vast. With its staging that perfectly partitions his space to make the house where the majority of the film is a chilling and breathtaking playground, with its stunning direction of actors and its incandescent violence, Parasite is a black jewel whose the humor of the scenario contrasts with the violence of the subject. A black jewel that will date in the filmography of his director.