Bong Joon-ho
Parasite

Yes, this is a great film, written, directed, and produced by a director who had already shown what he was made of years before with "The Host" (2006). And he gifted us with "Parasite" (released in Italy in November 2019), the last great film before the closure, among other things, of movie theaters. It arrived to us with a Palme d'Or on its shoulders, and a few months later it would sweep the Oscars, winning 4 in the most important categories (Best Picture; Best Director; Best Original Screenplay; Best International Feature Film), and that year in competition was Martin Scorsese with "The Irishman," to say the least.

It's an extraordinary film for many reasons, but one in particular: it is disorienting. It starts, essentially, as a comedy (a family, father-mother-two children, cramped into a sort of basement in the hellish architectural maze of Seoul), then it becomes even more amusing (the aforementioned family gets employed, through dubious means, by another family, this time wealthy and well-off), then it turns into a drama (they discover something in the wealthy family's basement), it transforms into a kind of thriller (nothing must be revealed to the wealthy family about what was discovered) and, finally, it becomes something halfway between a Tarantino film and any South Korean movie full of violence and blood. It starts with a smile, ends with stabbings.

"Parasite" is the ultimate synthesis of what a modern film should be. The era of great dialogues is over (even Tarantino, in his latest "Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood" made the characters talk too much and it eventually became tiring), and we have entered, willingly or not, the era of "everything fast" and "everything now," and of sudden change which, sometimes, doesn't last more than a day, so here is a film that changes continuously, makes dialogue a sharp weapon (especially in the first half) but not the main focus and knows, between the lines, how to narrate a humanity living on the margins of society willing to do anything and a second humanity, more cultured (perhaps) living comfortably as if nothing could surprise them anymore. The director harshly criticizes both faces of this society: there are no perfect demarcations between good and evil, both are, even the poor. And who the parasites of the title are, in the end, is not known; it could be both, each in their own way.

A critic wrote:

"Bong Joon-ho has built a career on the distortion of the fantastic, with large-scale plastic frescoes, but in Parasite there are no creatures, nor dives into the supernatural: just two families, two houses, and the brutal dissection of a class inequality in a society as much Korean as global."

This is exactly the point, in my opinion. A dichotomy far too evident between two worlds that, however, live in the same world even if they do not talk to or know each other. The mix between these two universes leads to an explosion, to a Big Bang that will explode into violence as brutal as it is inevitable (the poor family has fun, while the homeowners are out, pretending to be rich, as if their life purpose were an unnatural pretense rather than a natural everyday routine).

Many scenes to remember: the incredible plot twist halfway through the film; the surprising and definitive ending; the calm before the storm with, in the background, once chaos ensues, a 60s song with Gianni Morandi's voice (it's "In ginocchio da te"; Bong Joon-ho declared that his father had this cassette with some Italian songs from that era, who knows how it ended up in South Korea, and as a child, he listened to "In ginocchio da te" among others, years later he thought it wise to use it in one of his films, the effect it creates, especially for us Italians, is hilarious).

A beautiful film, perhaps a bit too long (2h and 12'), which drags a bit in the last quarter of an hour, stretching it out a bit, but by then, the best had already been given.