Nosh 185: 'Parasite', 'Weathering with You' & More

David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Parasite and Weathering with You)

 

Parasite

Why Parasite now? It opened months ago, and on Jan. 3 was among the worthy also-rans below my Top 12 list for 2019. It has obvious virtues (ace photography, design, acting, direction, themes), but as other movies crowded into the year-end line I lost the thread. On Feb. 9 the South Korean art film dominated the 92^nd Academy Awards, grabbing baldies for best movie, international feature (formerly foreign film), direction and original screenplay. The real show ribbon was director-writer Bong Joon-ho, in accepting so blithely gracious, sly, charming, funny, stunned but never speechless. Academy Town has never heard so much Korean, and no foreigner had so vamped it since goofy Roberto Benigni in 1999 (Life is Beautiful). A smash, but vote tallies, which are never released, would probably reveal that Parasite barely slipped past 1917 and Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.

Feeling a little neglectful, I streamed into re-viewing with a home encore. Again I found the look, moods and timing excellent.  Bong (The Host, Snowpiercer) is a high-craft auteur. The title parasite is the scrounging Kims, a family reduced to living in a septic basement flat (Dad welcomes street fumigation sprays, blowing through the window). Despite high IQs, Kim prospects are bleak. By luck, pluck, smiles and guile the Kims leech onto the Park family as servants. The Parks live la vie de luxe in a fab modern home perched above Seoul. The contrast between fathers (furtive, amoral Kim and smug, radio-voiced Park) and moms (Mrs. Kim a truck of hustle, Mrs. Park a sweetly vapid princess) echoes through their kids. The families virtually merge, like a mutant hybrid of Korean tensions and options (there is brief, black laughter about the hell regime up north). Story and dialog rhythms often have a dry comical edge, yet many reviewers have downplayed that, instead truffling for message tropes about extreme class division in urban capitalism. Few noted debts dated 1963: Akira Kurosawa’s great High and Low, in which that division is analyzed with a less gothic mastery, and Joseph Losey’s sinister Pinter drama The Servant.

Parasite purrs seductively, subversively, and its portents darken on smooth arcs of suspense. But the climax violence, shot in ironic sunlight, broke (for me) the spell. After long passages of tricky build-up, we get ambushed by morbid pulp, a generic squish. And for all the good acting, the virtual star is the grand modernist home (architect: production designer Lee Ha-jun). I couldn’t help wondering if the movie vamped the Academy because so many of its voters live in such trophy homes, or aspire to them, or fear losing them to the grubby groundlings down in the crowded Valley. When, in Zabriskie Point, Antonioni blew up (repeatedly) a modern desert home, it was a cartoonish overload of radical chic. Bong is playing a smarter game, yet for my taste Parasite rides clever, calculated rails to an over-determined payoff. I was never bored, but I felt played. But hey, I’ve never had an Oscars vote.

Weathering with You    

A brief Seoul flood in Parasite is a drop in the bucket next to the torrents hitting Tokyo in Makoto Shinkai’s often astonishing animation, Weathering with You. In Shinkai’s 2016 hit Your Name, Japan faced a “millennial comet.” Now the immense city endures a summer-long monsoon in which Shinkai’s team creates fantastic skyscapes and city vistas, tropically fluent with downpours, magical drops, seepage, rust, rot, rainbows and spells of radiance. It all pivots on a magical teen girl. She has a miraculous Buddhist rooting in the highest, puffiest clouds of dream, myth and meteorology. The nature raptures recall Miyazaki’s  animations and, ancestrally, the pounding rain at the grand gate which opens and closes Kurosawa’s Rashomon.

I loved the context (of watercolor deluge) and textures (from Turner clouds to rusted iron) but the conceptual subtext is sodden and dippy. The people are caught in the pop taffy of Japanese animé kitsch: jittery teen romance, twinks of flesh, big-eyed nymphets, toys, kittens, even an odd salute to McDonald’s burgers. For a story this fluent such goo is a weak foundation. My advice: turn off the subtitles, swim in the visuals, surf the beauty that Shinkai makes from his morphing of classic Japanese anxieties (storms, earthquakes, atomic power) into the anxieties of  global warming and flooding. Tokyo can take it – maybe.  

SALAD (A List)

My 15 Favorite Asian Movies

In order (with nation, director and year):

Seven Samurai (Japan, Akira Kurosawa 1954), The World of Apu (India, Satyajit Ray 1959), Offside (Iran, Jafar Panahi 2006), When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Japan, Mikio Naruse 1960), Ikiru (Japan, Akira Kurosawa 1952), The Music Room (India, Satyajit Ray 1958), An Actor’s Revenge (Japan, Kon Ichikawa 1963), Rashomon (Japan, Akira Kurosawa 1950), The White Balloon (Iran, Jafar Panahi (1995), Ugetsu (Japan, Kenzi Mizoguchi 1954), Shoplifters (Japan, Hirokazu Kore-eda 2018), Taste of Cherry (Iran, Abbas Kiarostami 1997), High and Low (Japan, Akira Kurosawa 1963), The Scent of Green Papaya (Vietnam/France, Tran Anh Hung 1993) and The Twilight Samurai (Japan, Yoji Yamada 2002).      

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles was often fond of, and patient with, lesser directors for whom he worked in his check-chasing years. Like English gent Anthony Asquith (The Winslow Boy, The Importance of Being Earnest), the son of a prime minister, for whom he did a small, silly role in the Burton and Taylor star vehicle The VIPs: “He was one of the nicest, most intelligent people ever in films. His nickname was Puffin. I was very happy to be with him, though he wasn’t in real control of that picture. And, my God, he was polite. I saw Puffin all alone on the stage once, trip over an electric cable, then turn around and say to it ‘I beg your pardon.’ ” (Quote from the Welles and Peter Bogdanovich book This is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The money angel for Mel Brooks’s best film, The Producers, was showman Joseph E. Levine: “Up from the garment trade, Levine hustled imported schlock (Godzilla) and elite caviar (Long Day’s Journey Into Night), artistic magic (Fellini’s 8½) and hambone schlock (The Oscar). In 1967 Levine also had something new cooking with Mike Nichols, a quirky comedy called The Graduate (which so enthused him he would sour on Brooks’s film). Brooks took Levine’s $941,000 for a slam-it-in-thc-can, 40-day shoot.” (From the Zero Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.) 

DESSERT (An Image)

The feeling for men in spaces of action is almost encyclopedic in Seven Samurai (Toho Film 1954; director Akira Kurosawa, d.p. Asakazu Nakai).

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