‘While you’re laughing, I want to hit you with a hidden blade’
As ‘Parasite’ wins the Palme d’or at Cannes, Robbie Collin considers social satire by stealth
‘Some films are slices of life, but mine are slices of cake,” Alfred Hitchcock often said. In fact, his best were often both: a tranche of creamy gateau delicately set between the teeth of a bear trap. Cinema has a duty to delight, but it can also bite back. That kind of veiled social satire was in rude health at Cannes this year, which had a programme thick with films that lured you in with the promise of pudding, only to reveal that the main item on the menu was you.
The festival’s top prize, the Palme d’or, was awarded to Parasite,a blood-drizzled thriller from South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho. The 49-year-old filmmaker is a master of this kind of social satire by stealth: his 2006 monster movie The Host was a covert jibe at South Korean bureaucracy and the American military’s conduct in the region; while his 2013 science-fiction epic Snowpiercer was an apocalyptic wealth-gap allegory that would have made JG Ballard fizz with envy.
Parasite carries on this tradition, with its story of a wily lower-class family who inveigle themselves into a bourgeois household by taking on domestic jobs under false pretences. Yet, once the intruders are cosily ensconced, they discover their new modernist dream home has secrets of its own, while viewers are invited to ask themselves exactly who is leeching off whom.
“I really respect films that deal with heavy political issues very seriously but I much prefer to mix that with humour,” Bong told reporters after Saturday evening’s awards. “While they’re laughing, I want them to be hit like a hidden blade, when they’re not expecting it.”
Steel flashed elsewhere at the ceremony too, not least in Mati Diop’s Grand Prix winner Atlantique, a ghost story that riffs poetically on social injustice in present-day Senegal. And even Jim Jarmusch’s offbeat zombie comedy, The Dead Don’t Die, this year’s opening film, offered an often naggingly familiar vision of middle America devouring itself alive.
‘I respect films that deal with heavy political issues very seriously but I prefer to mix that with humour’
Few of us go to the cinema to be lectured but by merely teasing the points they want to make with breadcrumb trails, great social satires allow us the fairy-tale thrill of using our wits to follow along. And, like caricatures, they don’t reflect the world back at us as we know it, but with its flaws distorted, or cartoonishly enlarged. Parasite toys with farce, suspense and horror – it’s in no sense a realistic film – yet by cycling through genres, it keeps finding new angles to attack its core themes of cross-class tensions and systemic power imbalances. Fancy a two-hour documentary on those subjects instead? No thanks, just pass the Bong.
When Curzon releases Parasite in the UK later this year, cinema owners will be hoping that their customers share the Cannes crowd’s enthusiasm, and the recent box-office success of
Us should give them cause for optimism. Jordan Peele’s doppelgänger shocker used horror to dissect our current populist moment. Peele did the same to liberal racism in 2017’s Get Out, which drew deserved comparisons with the work of Ira Levin, whose 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby – later filmed by Roman Polanski – used a tower block of Satanists as a symbol for America’s failure to come to terms with its national closet full of skeletons.
Us was terrifying too, but fell more in the tradition of the great Luis Buñuel, who pushed European bourgeois mores into the realm of the surreal and absurd. His 1962 comedy The Exterminating Angel featured a gaggle of aristocrats who became trapped in a perpetual dinner party of their own making, while 1972’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie flipped the script with its hapless band of upper-crust types who can’t ever seem to sit down and eat.
Buñuel knew better than to explain his work, and sometimes went as far as to circulate bogus inside information to throw critics off the scent. When The Exterminating Angel premiered at Cannes, he told his son to announce at the press conference that the film’s unsettling repeated shots had been included because the original cut had come in a little short.
The affable and self-effacing Bong probably wouldn’t dream of following suit. But don’t doubt the sharpness of his knife.