Bong Joon-ho
Parasite

It takes class to tell of misery, making you laugh and cry at the same time. It takes courage to spit in the face of the bourgeoisie, mocking it in this way. It takes cruelty to soak in blood a story that is already painful in itself.

For once, when mainstream media says this is the film of the year, you have to give them credit. The feeling it evokes is envy. Envy for a cinematic art that still knows how to look at the downtrodden without being an exercise in style, without that condescension from Europeans and Americans who, even when talking about crap, sell it to you as if it were chocolate.

Envy for a vision that speaks of the world's matters, before of itself and its art. An open window on reality, but from an isolated vantage point, almost out of time, allowing you to see things as they really are. The degenerations of the bourgeoisie I have never seen told so well, the joy of the poor who have nothing to lose I have seen instead in Kore’eda, yes, but never, never in recent Western works.

It might be said that the South Korean filmmaker applies the dictates of Eastern philosophy to illuminate his gaze on the daily contradictions of society (his and ours), on the war to survive (or rather, to live with dignity) that endures in the indifference of the majority. A wise Bong Joon-ho without ideas, without preconceptions (I got this from Jullien) who can therefore tell the truth. We Westerners are too immersed in consumer society to see ourselves from the outside, we are addicted to it and we don’t grasp its perversities. We don’t grasp our absurd fragilities.

I don't want to take away any emotion from viewing the film, I just say that here realism and stylization coexist miraculously, without falsifying themselves. There is social investigation and there are the rhythms of comedy, fun and disgust, manga comic slapstick and the descent into the underworld that sometimes the human being can accept as a "lesser evil."

And there is music and there are images that look like paintings, among forests of telephone wires and stairways that seem like chasms. There is the universal flood that exclusively punishes the wretched, while for the rich it is just the disappointment of a camping weekend to cancel. There is above all a tone that always puts important concepts in the foreground, the philosophical and social reading of facts, but without ever weighing down the quick pace of the narrative, which also works well for the more superficial categories of cinema, such as entertainment, thrill, surprise, and plot.

A cinema that, by telling the world, wishes to make it a better place. A cinema that is a revolutionary gesture, an attempt to dismantle the everyday evil. By laughing at it, not giving too much weight to tragedy, yet sanctioning in the end a nihilism that couldn't be blacker. "If you have no plans, nothing can go wrong." A cinema with the smell (nauseating to the bourgeois) of the many who scramble, perhaps forced to be more cruel than the unaware lords in their monumental homes. A war among the poor unfolds in the basement of society, which has no pity for those left behind. Even just telling it is a first light in that basement.