Monthly Archives: February 2020

  • Parasite

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gisaenchung

    Bong Joon-ho (2019)

    The main characters of Parasite may be a nuclear family but their circumstances instantly mark them out as a singular screen household.  Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), his wife Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin) and their twentysomething children – son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) and daughter Ki-jeong (Park So-dam) – share a cramped, semi-basement apartment in the bowels of a present-day South Korean city, presumably Seoul.  The hovel’s décor, such as it is, reveals that Chung-sook was once a medal-winning hammer-thrower.  Ki-taek has started up a succession of businesses, all of which have gone bust.  The whole family is now out of work, except for earning a few pennies folding boxes for a local pizzeria (their meagre wages are docked when they fail, as they often do, to fold the boxes correctly).  To access wi-fi, Ki-woo and Ki-jeong and their phones crouch beside the window, cheek by jowl with the family toilet.  When the street outside is being fumigated, Ki-jeong wants to close the window.  Her father, mindful of the ‘stink bugs’ infesting their home, says to keep it open – ‘we’ll get free extermination’.

    Whereas Ki-woo repeatedly failed his university entrance exam, his boyhood friend Min-hyuk (Park Seo-joon) has a degree and is preparing for further study abroad.  As a parting gift, he presents to Ki-woo’s family what Min-hyuk describes as a ‘scholar’s rock’ – a hefty good luck charm, reputed to guarantee wealth for whoever owns it.  Min-hyuk also has a practical suggestion to get the Kims started on the road to riches.  He has been teaching English to the daughter of a wealthy family in the city.  He encourages Ki-woo to pose as a university student and take over the tutoring job.  Ki-woo follows his friend’s advice and the ruse works.  It does indeed mark the start of a change in the Kims’ economic fortunes.

    The English pupil is Da-hye (Jeong Ji-so), the late-teenage daughter of successful businessman Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) and his wife Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong).  Their younger son, the eccentric Da-song (Jung Hyeon-jun), is ‘an artist by nature’, according to his mother, but he goes through art therapists like loaves of bread.  Ki-woo tells his new employer he may know just the person to take on the role – a classmate of his cousin.  In fact, she’s his sister.  Ki-jeong accompanies Ki-woo on his next visit to the Park mansion.  Before ringing the doorbell, she checks with her brother the outline of the script she’s learned:  ‘Jessica, only child – Chicago, Illinois – classmate of your cousin’.  Just as she calls herself Jessica, so Ki-woo, in his dealings with the rich family, gives himself the name Kevin.  Park Dong-ik styles himself professionally as Nathan Park:  a poster advertising his international business success announces ‘Nathan Park on Central Park’.  I assume these (and other) Anglo-American details in Parasite are a form of social one-upmanship, easily understood as such by Korean audiences.  (I’m only guessing but the film’s interesting music may reflect the same idea in a different register.  The composer Jung Jae-il is Korean but the elegant melancholy of the score suggests a pastiche of western music.)

    Ki-jeong too is soon a fixture on the premises along with her brother.  He is soon in a secret relationship with Da-hye, who isn’t much of a student but fancies her tutor.  The Parks’ affluent lifestyle includes a chauffeur and a live-in housekeeper but the incumbents don’t last much longer.  Ki-jeong leaves a pair of her knickers in the car, enough for the Parks to assume the chauffeur (Park Geun-rok) has been having casual sex in the vehicle, and to fire him.  He’s replaced by Ki-taek, also working to a script devised by Ki-woo.  The housekeeper, Gook Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun), requires more sophisticated character assassination.  The Kims exploit her allergy to peaches and, with the help of little sachets of blood-red sauce, convince Yeon-gyo that the housekeeper has tuberculosis and is a health risk.  Moon-gwang moves out and Chung-sook moves in.

    Bong Joon-ho describes the Kims’ infiltration of the Park household with a light, sure touch:  from the word go, Parasite is briskly engaging.  It’s also plainly self-aware.  When he receives the fortune-bringing rock from his friend (and at a couple of other points in the first half of the story), Ki-woo exclaims, ‘That’s so metaphorical!’  Just what plenty of the audience – the arthouse audience, at any rate – will be thinking from the moment Bong introduces the impoverished family’s nearly subterranean living conditions.  Bong is an established auteur whose six previous features (none of which I’ve seen) include some major commercial successes but this latest film has far outstripped its predecessors on all fronts.  Ever since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and opened in South Korea, both in late May last year, Parasite has been receiving critical acclaim and awards, and making money, hand over fist.  Deservedly so:  as A O Scott wrote in the New York Times, this ‘aesthetically-energized movie … obliterates the tired distinctions between art films and popcorn movies’.

    Up to the point at which all four Kims have a foot in the Parks’ door, Parasite seems a sharply satirical but reasonably straightforward social comedy, its plot propelled by the interaction of the complacent, gullible haves and the variously resourceful have-nots.  (The title character is surely both the main families.)  When the Parks go off on a camping trip for Da-song’s birthday and the Kims, in their absence, take up temporary residence in the mansion, the plot thickens and the mood darkens.  Thunder rumbles outside – again, so metaphorical but it also presages the Parks’ premature return on account of widespread heavy rain that washes out their camping.  In the meantime, there’s been another unexpected visitor to the property.  The ex-housekeeper Moon-gwang turns up, explaining that, when she and the Parks parted company, she left something behind.  Moon-gwang also looked after the place for its previous owner (an architect, who designed the house).  She knows it inside out, better than the blithely oblivious Parks do.  What Moon-gwang left behind was her husband, Geun-se (Park Myung-hoon).  Like Ki-taek, Geun-se set up a business that failed.  For the last four years, he’s been hiding from loan sharks in the Parks’ basement.

    This revelation occurs about halfway through the film.  In the second half, the narrative momentum continues to increase and the tone repeatedly changes.  This never seems a false change of tone, so cleverly does Bong continue to seed his story’s alarming potential.  Chung-sook receives a phone call from Yeon-gyo to let her know the Parks will be home in a few minutes – just time enough for the Kims frantically to conceal evidence of the mess they’ve made of the place and of Moon-gwang’s return to the premises, not time enough for father, son and daughter Kim to make their getaway.

    This results in one of the film’s funniest bits.  Da-song has a thing about all things American-Indian.  He’s also just been given a walkie-talkie.   In spite of the unrelenting torrential rain, he insists on spending the night in the garden, in his wigwam, maintaining radio contact with his parents indoors.  They sleep, and make out, on a sofa that overlooks the garden; Ki-taek, his son and daughter hide under a nearby table.  When they eventually manage to make their escape and return to their own dwelling, they find it flooded out.  With the waters about to wash away Chung-sook’s hammer-throwing medal, her husband, who wanted the windows left open at the start, now yells for them to be closed.

    What seemed an ironic economic fable has broadened into something more regretful and more garish.   The former comes through first in the sequence in a gymnasium, where the Kim trio, along with many other families whose homes are flooded, spends the rest of the night.  The regret comes through too in the increasingly oppressed face and bearing of Ki-taek, not only in the gymnasium but also at the party that the Parks, on the spur of the moment, decide to throw the following day.  Parasite’s garish side comes through in its violence, which climaxes at this impromptu party.

    The BBC arts editor Will Gompertz, though full of admiration in his online review, gives the film four stars rather than five because, in the closing stages, it ‘lurches into the melodramatic’.  I assume Gompertz thinks the lurch occurs at the Parks’ garden party:  in retrospect, I’ve fewer reservations about this climactic bloodbath than with the preceding mayhem inside the mansion.  This starts with a fracas involving Moon-gwang, Geun-se and the Kims, when they first discover each other’s secrets (immediately before the Parks return home).  It’s followed, just as the outdoor party is getting into full swing, in a kitchen confrontation between Ki-woo and Geun-se, whose wife has died as a result of what the Kims did to her.  When Ki-woo offers the scholar’s rock by way of olive branch, Geun-se bludgeons him over the head with it.  (That’s why it had to be so heavy.)

    The violence in Parasite doesn’t come out of nowhere:  it feels increasingly like a bomb waiting to go off.  Yet the savagery, once it begins, isn’t only emphatic.  It also has the effect of upping the brutal ante:  the carnage in the garden has to top what’s gone before.  After braining Ki-woo, Geun-se grabs a kitchen knife, stumbles out into the sunlight he hasn’t experienced in years and stabs Ki-jeong.  Da-song passes out at the sight of this.  After a struggle, Chun-sook impales Geun-se with a skewer.  Dong-ik leans over the body of Geun-se and recoils at the smell.  For Ki-taek, this is the last straw.  Much earlier in the story, Da-song remarks that all four members of the Parks’ new staff have the same smell, and sniffs them in turn.  There have been several subsequent references to, in particular, Ki-taek’s odour – ‘like an old radish’, Dong-ik jokes to his wife as they make love within earshot of Ki-taek, trapped in the same room and fearful his pong will give him away.  It makes sense that Dong-ik’s reaction to the stink of a man who’s lived four years with no mod cons is what causes the humiliated Ki-taek to snap.  He stabs Dong-ik fatally and flees the scene.

    Although its impact would be even greater if the audience didn’t, by this stage, see violence as an essential, increasing element of the film’s style, this culminating havoc is brilliantly realised.  Bong Joon-ho replicates the farce pace of the Kims’ efforts to clear the scene of incriminating evidence before the Parks’ return home; the same speed of action now reflects startling and engulfing disorder.  What follows in Parasite is repeatedly disorienting.  Kim-woo now, for the first time, starts to narrate the story in voiceover.   He wakes in hospital after several days in a coma.  There’s no lasting brain damage but his injuries have left a neurological legacy of involuntary laughter – a condition that naturally brings to mind a fellow-sufferer, the protagonist of Joker.  Like the latter’s pseudobulbar affect, Kim-woo’s is no laughing matter.  Unlike Arthur Fleck’s problem, Ki-woo’s is weirdly shocked out of his system by bad news, that his sister died of her stab wounds.  The film’s closing minutes, which jump into the near future, concern Kim-woo’s attempts to find his father, still wanted for the murder of Dong-ik and supposedly on the run.  The location of Ki-taek’s life in hiding comes as no surprise:  he’s the new tenant of the bunker in the mansion, which is now owned by a German family.  The final sequences switch poignantly between Ki-woo’s fantasy of family reunion and the reality of his afterlife.

    I wouldn’t want to see Parasite again in a hurry but it is quite something.  Song Kang-ho, one of South Korea’s leading actors, heads a top-notch ensemble cast.  Bong may have drawn some inspiration from the real-life case of the French Papin sisters (also said to have inspired Jean Genet’s play The Maids and, thereby, Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie) but his screenplay, co-written by Han Jin-won, feels novel and is ingeniously constructed.  The editor, Yang Jin-mo, has done a superlative job – so too Lee Ha-jun, the production designer who built the Park mansion for the film.   The socioeconomic state of things that Bong dramatises, while it has a particular resonance in his own country, amounts to a broadside on global(ised) capitalism.  Yet Parasite is a remarkable balancing act.  Without making light of his weighty theme, Bong Joon-ho has crafted an exuberant entertainment.

    3 February 2020

  • Pinky

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elia Kazan (1949)

    The actor and director Burt Caesar introduced this BFI screening of Pinky.  It was early Sunday evening and Caesar started by promising the NFT3 audience we weren’t in for a sermon.  He spoke with such knowledgeable, sonorous solemnity that the intro did have a morally improving flavour about it, though some humour too.  Caesar’s pause before his closing ‘thank you’ was actorishly timed but this is nitpicking.  Given what BFI introductions are sometimes like, you could only be grateful for such a thoroughly expert curtain-raiser.

    Burt Caesar kept his word in not giving away plot details but he made clear enough the main themes of Pinky.  That led him to comment on the film’s most enduringly controversial aspect.  The title character, Patricia ‘Pinky’ Johnson, a young woman of colour so light-skinned that she has passed for white, is played by a white actress, Jeanne Crain.  Caesar suggested, with maybe a touch of irony, that Crain’s casting was defensible on the grounds that plenty of officially white people have non-white blood somewhere in their ancestry.   He was making the point that race is largely a false construct, and fair enough.  It’s nevertheless hard to watch Pinky without deploring the choice of lead, which pandered to public prejudices of the time.  White audiences could rest assured that Jeanne Crain, a big name, was feigning being a ‘tragic mulatto’ – no less than Jane Wyman had feigned being a deaf mute in Johnny Belinda the previous year.   (They’re just pretending – it’s what actors do …)

    Pinky, who has been training as a nurse in Boston, returns to her childhood home in the South – to the shack where she was raised by her grandmother Dicey (Ethel Waters), an illiterate laundress.  Able to deny her ethnicity without questions being asked in Boston, Pinky has done just that, and has fallen in love with a white doctor, Tom Adams (William Lundigan), who’s unaware of her race and background.  When she first arrives at Dicey’s, Pinky says she’s planning to stay only a few days.  Back in the place she started from, she doesn’t conceal her racial identity and is quickly reminded just how uncongenial that makes her native heath.  Attempting to reclaim money owed to her grandmother for laundry work, Pinky is harassed by racist law officers.  Two white men try to sexually assault her.  When an African-American medic (Kenny Washington) encourages her to stay in the area to train black student nurses, Pinky tells him she’ll soon be heading back north.  Her departure is delayed when she reluctantly agrees, at her grandmother’s urging, to provide care for Dicey’s ailing, elderly neighbour Miss Em (Ethel Barrymore).  Pinky dislikes this old woman:  she remembers that, as a child, she was shooed off the property.  As a consequence, Pinky has always seen Miss Em as typical of local bigotry but, as the two spend more time together, warms to her patient.  The feeling is mutual.

    There’s another reason to regret that Jeanne Crain is Pinky:  she isn’t very good.  It’s a not unfamiliar performance from someone who has made their name in lighter roles (Crain’s biggest success had been in the musical State Fair):  the actor betrays the weight of responsibility of playing a serious one – a responsibility that may have been felt more keenly in this case because of the race issues involved.  Crain is committed but limited.  She has a few good bits:  when Miss Em makes Pinky laugh;  more extendedly, when she inherits the old woman’s house and twenty acres of land and Pinky is increasingly determined to hold on to her inheritance, in spite of legal challenge from Miss Em’s family.  For the most part, though, Crain’s effects are too obviously prepared.  Her conspicuously unnatural movement makes Pinky odd-girl-out in the wrong way.

    Elia Kazan inherited the cast, crew and settings from John Ford, whose surprising involvement in the project ended abruptly, shortly after shooting began.  Kazan later expressed his dissatisfaction with Jeanne Crain (‘a sweet girl … but she was like a Sunday school teacher’[1]) and with 20th Century Fox’s refusal to let him shoot at least part of Pinky on location (‘Almost everything was shot in the studio … Naturally, there was no dirt, no sweat, no water, no anything’[2]).  The approach to Dicey’s shack certainly looks like a stage set.  In spite of Kazan’s lack of enthusiasm for the picture, he delivers some potent scenes – notably when Doc Joe (Griff Barnett), Miss Em’s physician and executor, informs Pinky and Dicey of the contents of Miss Em’s will.  Because black-and-white films are now so unusual, it may be easier for a twenty-first century audience to see Joseph MacDonald’s cinematography as expressive in relation to the racial themes.  Pinky’s white nurse’s uniform has particular impact.

    Miss Em’s cousin Jeffers Wooley (Everett Glass) and, more volubly, his wife Melba (Evelyn Varden) contest the will that bequeaths Miss Em’s property to Pinky.  As racist as she’s rapacious, Melba pays an entertaining visit to the old lady earlier in the film.  When Pinky starts nursing her, Miss Em asks what she thinks of ‘my best brooch’; Pinky politely and correctly identifies it as ‘one of those rather clever imitations one can buy in the chain stores for a dollar’.  Melba judges the same brooch ‘priceless – a real antique’; it’s a nice joke that she inherits Miss Em’s jewellery.  The courtroom scenes are uneasy, dominated as they are by Dan Riss’s bizarrely unctuous interpretation of the plaintiffs’ lawyer[3].   Pinky is represented, though reluctantly, by the recently retired Judge Walker (Basil Ruysdael).  Their prospects of winning the case seem bleak when Doc Joe can’t make it to court to give evidence in Pinky’s support (he’s busy delivering a baby at the time).  The new judge (Raymond Greenleaf) confounds everyone, the film’s audience included, by ruling in her favour.  The strongest moment in court comes, though, in Walker’s sting-in-the-tail words to his client:  ‘Well, Pinky, you won.  You got the house and the land.  And you got justice.  But I doubt if any other interests of this community have been served’.

    Pinky benefits greatly from its two senior Ethels, whose performing styles are very different but equally effective.   Ethel Barrymore, decidedly theatrical, plays Miss Em with incisive wit:  she makes clear the old woman is a giant ego who scolds all-comers, regardless of their race or role.  Ethel Waters’s celebrated ‘force of nature’ presence (impressive but, I think, wrong for her character in Fred Zinnemann’s The Member of the Wedding three years later) is enriching here.  Waters is especially affecting in suggesting Dicey’s mixed feelings about the provisions of the will.  She’s already grieving the loss of someone she considered a friend; she knows that Pinky’s inheritance is bound to complicate their lives.  (Miss Em leaves her entire wardrobe to Dicey, who’s particularly appreciative of the footwear:  ‘Sometimes I think she always get her shoes extra big ‘cause when they fit her just right, they pinch my bunion’.  Just as well the shoes fit:  it’s hard to see how someone of Ethel Waters’s size could find much use for Ethel Barrymore’s clothes.)

    Pinky takes to heart the precise wording of Miss Em’s bequest, ‘being an expression of my genuine regard for her and my confidence in the use to which she will put this property’.   Being taken to court to fight for it sharpens Pinky’s determination to justify her benefactor’s ‘confidence’ and to live as a woman of colour.  She’s already told Tom Adams, who has tracked Pinky down to Dicey’s shack, the truth of her ethnic identity.  Tom still wants to marry her but on the understanding that she’ll continue to conceal her colour from the rest of the world.  Pinky eventually tells him that ‘I can’t deny it – I can’t pretend to be anything else, and I don’t want to be anything else’, and Tom exits sharply.

    In the film’s final sequence, Pinky has turned her inheritance into ‘Miss Em’s Nursery and Clinic’, peopled by African-American staff and children.  Like the casting of Jeanne Crain, the ending is designed to appeal to white audiences (which Pinky certainly succeeded in doing:  it was 20th Century Fox’s top-grossing film of 1949) and is a cop out.   The screenplay, by Philip Dunne and Dudley Nichols, is adapted from a novel, Quality, by Cid Ricketts Sumner.  In his excellent book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks (1973), the black film historian Donald Bogle explains and comments as follows:

    ‘In Quality … Pinky won her courtroom case, but the Ku Klux Klan burned down Miss Em’s house in retaliation.  That ending was far more honest than the optimistic everything’s-gonna-work-out-fine tone at the film’s end, when a group of cute ebony nurses are seen laughing in the converted hospital.’

    2 February 2020

    [1]  Quoted by Lorraine LoBianco, tcm.com

    [2]  ibid.

    [3]  I assumed this actor wouldn’t have been in the film if Elia Kazan had had a say in the casting.  It was a surprise to see Dan Riss, just a couple of days later, in Panic in the Streets, in which Kazan ‘handpicked everybody’.  Dan Riss overacts in that film, too.

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