Good filmmakers believe in their characters; great filmmakers believe in their characters and their setting. Now, before you fight me, I want you to watch Parasite–the Korean feature film directed by Bong Joon-ho that not only won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020 but also brought Korean cinema under the global spotlight. Edgar Allan Poe believed that tone and mood are the best guides to storytelling. Bong Joon-ho proves it with Parasite. In your first viewing, you might not notice how the filmmaker focuses all his directorial energy on materializing the singular mood of the narrative: ascent and descent. However, then you notice just how many times the film’s characters go up and down stairs.Whether emotional, financial, or social, the staircase, a part of architecture that at its core signifies levels, becomes the primary visual motif of discrimination and class disparity in Bong’s Parasite— a film centered on inequality.In this article, we explore how Parasite is basically a “staircase” movie.(SPOILERS AHEAD!)Bong Joon-ho’s Play With Elevation Parasite (2019)Credit: NeonParasite centers on three Korean families whose fates are intertwined by the evils of the social structure. What we see in Parasite is the story of every country, all over the world. The society is divided into levels, discriminating between people based on their wealth, with capitalism feeding on the disparity between the rich and the poor. As a result, one strata becomes parasitic on another to survive.The film opens with the destitute Kim family, a family of four, living in a...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Yesterday