Bong Joon-ho´s bizarre black comedy about a rich Korean family and a poor one in a modern-day Downton Abbey situation gets its tendrils in youBong Joon-ho has returned to Cannes with a luxuriously watchable and satirical suspense drama. It runs as purringly smooth as the Mercedes driven by the lead character, played by Korean star Song Kang-ho. Parasite is a bizarre black comedy about social status, aspiration, materialism and the patriarchal family unit, and people who accept the idea of having (or leasing) a servant class.Parasite is about a wealthy Korean family in a modern-day Downton Abbey upstairs-downstairs situation, one far more unstable than the patrician caste realises. The film could perhaps be a bit more lean and mean, and deliver its jeopardy and payoff with more despatch. But it is an enjoyable, elegant, scabrous movie about a mix of servitude and trickery that is an interesting theme in Korean cinema.The film, which is sumptuously designed, could be compared with, say, Park Chan-wook´s The Handmaiden, an adaptation of the novel Fingersmith by Sarah Walters; and also Im Sang-son´s 2010 Cannes item The Housemaid, a remake of Kim Ki-Young´s classic Korean thriller from 1960. Also notable is the film´s focus on poverty, desperation and the phenomenon of those in debt having to vanish to escape creditors (also a theme in Lee Chang-dong´s 2018 film Burning). Song Kang-ho plays Ki-taek, a shiftless, unemployed man who lives in a chaotic, stinky and squalid basement with his wife, Chung-sook, his smart yet cynical twentysomething daughter, Ki-jung (Park So-dam), and son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik). They are all out of work and out of cash. Then Ki-woo gets a stroke of fortune: an old school-friend helps him get a lucrative tutoring job. With a fake college diploma created by Ki-jung, he shows up at the fabulously lavish home of the Park family, wealthy entrepreneur Mr Park (Lee Sun-kyun), his delicate, unworldly wife, Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), their teen daug ...
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