Hit you where you live
worn-out-ness, with flowered wallpaper that has dulled over time. The Hummels can only dream about wallpaper.
Those details are hardly incidental. The March home is based on the home where author Louisa May Alcott wrote the novel “Little Women.” “Our version of the March house is a bit broken and run-down on the outside,” production designer Jess Gonchor told The Times, “but the interiors have this flow of positive energy and color.”
But they are interiors, as the March sisters are keenly aware, that speak to their status.
Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” up for a production design Oscar, likewise offers interesting juxtapositions of rich and poor.
The camera lovingly dwells on the creature comforts of the Hollywood Hills home that belongs to actor Rick Dalton ( Leonardo DiCaprio), including a full bar and a swimming pool with L.A. views. Cut to the home of Brad Pitt’s barely employed stuntman Cliff Booth, a banged-up trailer behind the Van Nuys Drive-In. It is stuffed with decidedly unfancy clutter: dishes in the sink, dirty dog bowl in the corner, television on a teetering TV tray. “We wanted to put Cliff in the realm of a drive-in,” production designer Barbara Lin told the Hollywood Reporter. “I love that whole environment for Cliff, putting him in such a different world from the [one] in which he serves as stuntman.”
Todd Phillips’ “Joker” goes beyond individual environments.
The film opens with Joaquin Phoenix, as Arthur Fleck, applying clown makeup in a gloomy, industrial room as radio news reports talk about Gotham’s garbage crisis. Shortly thereafter, he is assaulted by a group of teens in an alley. Thus begins a spiral that puts the emotionally unstable Fleck on the path to becoming the Joker. And part of that path is the one of a society aff licted by rampant economic inequity — all conveyed by the crumbling prewar apartment building that Fleck inhabits, with its flaking paint and dire hallways.
It is also conveyed by the city itself, a rat-filled, crime-saturated Gotham that evokes the New York City of Bernhard Goetz, the vigilante who shot four African American teens on the New York City subway in 1984. A similar scene occurs in “Joker,” in which Fleck shoots at a pack of bratty financiers who bully him on the train. (In a case that made national headlines, Goetz was found not guilty on all charges except for carrying an unlicensed weapon.)
The film is every paranoia about the urban rendered on screen: a vision of cities as festering sites of crime and filth, evocative of the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” New York of the 1970s and the ways Donald Trump talks about Chicago today. All of it is paralleled by the wealthy moguls who seem untouched by the decay.
Fleck’s sickly mother is hopeful that mogul Thomas Wayne, whom she once knew, will rescue her and her son from their poverty.
But that’s not in the cards. As Fleck’s counselor tells him, after funding is cut for his mental health services, “They don’t give a ... about people like you, Arthur. And they really don’t give a ... about people like me either.”
But it is ultimately “Parasite” that uses architecture to tackle the inequity in the most direct ways: a tragicomic story about the parallel lives of the wealthy Park family and the poor Kim family that work for them in household jobs acquired through ingenious scams. But even before the plot has begun to unfurl, the architecture in the film has already articulated the class tension.
The Parks inhabit a state-ofthe-art estate. The Kim family lives in a style of semi-basement apartment that is common to Seoul, where the film is set. Known as banjiha in Korean, this style of housing offers little in the way of creature comforts such as daylight. Contrast that to the Parks’ large picture window, which overlooks a vast, manicured garden.
It is the Kims’ banjiha that opens the film: with socks drying before a row of four grimy windows. Milk crates stacked high against walls burst with clutter. The wires that provide electricity are visible as they run along ceilings and walls. A tiny bathroom features not a soaking tub, but a toilet set on an elevated platform (presumably a way to flush waste without having to dig any deeper for plumbing).
In an Indiewire interview, Lee Ha Jun, nominated for a production design Oscar, described the toilet as “a temple of excrement.” No wonder the Kims do whatever it takes to worm their way into the Parks’ sumptuous home. But none of it results in what they imagine.
Those pristine magazine homes? It turns out they have plenty of room for skeletons in their capacious, walk-in closets.