Parasite

One of last year's nominees for Best Picture was a black & white film, Roma, about a girl who works as a servant for a wealthy family.  Over the course of the film we see the wealthy family treat their servants with indifference, and sometime with cruelty.  Yet, the closing moments of the film are offer some important perspective; even family members are often treated with indifference and cruelty.  It becomes clear that the girl is a member of the family. 

This year, one of the nominees for Best Picture is a film from South Korea, Parasite, about a family that is struggling to survive by folding pizza boxes for a local pizza shop.  Their WiFi has been turned off, which is a clear indication that they've sunken to a new low.  A friend of the family helps one of the family members get a job as a tutor for teenage daughter of a technology company executive.  In no time at all, through a series of carefully orchestrated personnel changes, the entire family has traded in pizza box folding for jobs in the executive's home.  Roma and Parasite have central characters who are servants for wealthy families, and that's where the comparison ends.  The central characters of Parasite don't have any respect for the wealthy family, to the contrary, they have animosity for them, and look to manipulate them at every opportunity.

What's interesting is that the director of Parasite, Bong Joon Ho doesn't focus on the class conflict, rather he is interested in a certain struggle that is unique to the human condition; shame.  From the opening scenes where it is revealed that the central characters have been failing at everything; they can't keep jobs, they can't stay in school, and they can't fold pizza boxes very well.  As a result each of them feels a certain amount of shame, and they each are handling it in their own way.  What makes this film unique is that it is an amalgamation of two genres; part thoughtful ultra-realism character study (like Roma), and part twisted thriller (like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).  While this mixture ultimately worked, there were certain elements that just fell flat.  The scenes that were meant to be jarring felt uninspired, and the believably that was established in the first half of the film was missing during the climax.