THE BONG SHOW
The Best Picture Oscar win has made Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite a wild success. Now on Blu-ray, it makes a great double bill with his magnificent earlier Hollywood debut Snowpiercer.
Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Parasite’ and ‘Snowpiercer’ make a great double bill
Amid the euphoria of Parasite’s historic Oscar win, and its guaranteed place in pub-quiz immortality as the first foreign-language Best Picture winner, it was easy to miss the climax of a dramatic subplot. Back in 2013, Bong Joon-ho fell foul of the notorious temper of Harvey ‘Scissorhands’ Weinstein, producer of Bong’s 2013 Hollywood debut, Snowpiercer. Weinstein effectively buried the film, which went largely unseen, though its reputation among film fans raced forward as fast as the train at the centre of its plot. Head down the track seven years to February 2020, and in the very month that Bong’s gongs were awarded, Weinstein became a convicted sex offender.
The Blu-rays of Snowpiercer and Parasite put a fascinating spin on Bong’s triumphant journey. When you include the film he made in between — Okja (2017), a source of controversy after bypassing cinemas to head straight to Netflix – you can chart Bong’s path from ‘barely’ seen, via ‘sadly not seen on the big screen’ to ‘totally’ seen. Parasite was enjoying a huge upward surge in Australian cinemas, with US$3.75m box office before an entirely different kind of parasite closed the doors, not to mention simultaneously topping iTunes Australia’s movie downloads. Despite cinema closures, it became the UK box office’s biggest-ever foreign-language hit.
Nobody can say Bong doesn’t deserve it. Not only do Snowpiercer and Parasite show a filmmaker at the top of his game, they work brilliantly as a double feature. In both, Bong uses genre as a springboard into a satirical allegory about society. But while Snowpiercer is a model of forward momentum, Parasite flips the narrative 90 degrees to become a visual study in verticality and depth. Factor in that one is American and the other Korean, and it feels like Bong has limitless talent. He can do this from every angle.
First-class warfare
Snowpiercer’s originality can’t be faulted. True, there are some obvious antecedents for its industrial visuals: it’s no coincidence that one character is named Gilliam. But not even Terry made anything as barmy as this. The titular train is a mobile ark, holding humanity’s last refugees following an environmental catastrophe. But survival isn’t the same as equality, and the train, literally compartmentalised, is a diagram of class division. The tail-section passengers stage a revolt to rise up — or, rather, forward. The undeniably direct narrative sees Bong race through the train, each new scene outdoing the last for the bravura of the production design and the director’s inventive staging of action in confined quarters. Not since Das Boot has a film managed to turn claustrophobic limitations to such advantage.
Even in 2013, Bong was highly regarded and therefore able to assemble an impressively eclectic cast, mixing regular Korean collaborator Song Kang-ho (who returns in Parasite) with western actors including Chris Evans, Jamie Bell and Octavia Spencer. You know you’re on to something when you can persuade cult gods John Hurt and Tilda Swinton to symbolise the story’s good and evil axes.
The only ‘criticism’ one can attempt to level at Snowpiercer — and this only in retrospect — is that it’s not quite as good as Parasite. When the dust settles on the Oscar glory, we can marvel that, regardless of language, Bong’s fiendishly poised thriller simply isn’t the kind of film that will manage to do well at the Academy Awards. Parasite, meanwhile, stands as an unlikely proxy for the illustrious predecessors who never managed to convince the Academy to give this genre the top prizes more often: Hitchcock, Lang, Pakula and many more.
Stair quality
Next to Snowpiercer’s explicit satire, what’s remarkable is how cleverly Parasite masks its subversion. This is an elegantly crafted film, largely linear in storytelling and classical in technique. And yet, when it comes down to it, this is a savage piece of work. It brims with symbolism, with an especially vivid use of smell that ought to be impossible to convey on screen, but which Bong treats with nonchalant ease.
The radical narrative puts our sympathies firmly with the impoverished Kim family, whose gradual infiltration of the upper-class Park household drives the plot. The Parks aren’t bad people; indeed, they are the victims of a crime, and arguably the ‘Hollywood’ version of Parasite might tell the same story from their perspective. Yet they have the intellectual and emotional indolence of the very wealthy. They simply don’t have to think about their next meal; they have somebody on hand to prepare it. Instead, by making us complicit in the Kims’ guile and ingenuity — from stealing Wi-Fi to stealing an entire home — Bong shows things that others seldom see. Often, this is literal: from the Kims’ basement home to a hiding place underneath a table, the camera stoops to ground level or even lower. So often in the movies, stairs go up: they are typically a symbol of upwards mobility. Here, we rarely, if ever, see the Kims climb the stairs in Parasite, although we certainly see them descend. Indeed, the film’s gloriously unhinged twist relies on discovering how far down it’s possible to go. Which leaves Bong in an interesting place. He surely can’t get any higher after this — but don’t bet against him finding a way to avoid the drop. Simon Kinnear