One Perfect Scene: Bong Joon-Ho, Parasite, and the ultimate introduction to Korean new wave cinema

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Harry Fletcher2 April 2020

With the UK in lockdown, there’s never been a better time for film fans to discover new cinema.

With that in mind, we’re launching One Perfect Scene, a new regular feature where we take a close look at one perfect scene to introduce movie fans to a specific genre, era, actor or filmmaker.

This week, we’re focusing on the opening of director Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite as an introduction to the new wave of Korean cinema.

We start, as is tradition, at the beginning.

Parasite – Opening scene

It might seem a little obvious to go straight to Parasite – especially with movies like Memories of Murder, The Host and Mother in director Bong Joon-Ho’s filmography – but it’s impossible to overstate the impact this movie has had on western audiences. It's helped more people get over what Bong called the “one inch tall barrier of subtitles”, scooped Best Picture at the Oscars and has taken more money at the UK box office than any other foreign-language movie.

The film's opening scene is one of its most understated but important. The film's protagonists, the Kim family, sit down to dinner in their semi-overground home in Seoul, with their front room wedged halfway between street level and basement and their table covered in bugs. They are living on the poverty line, and their house – a common housing type in the Korean capital – is the embodiment of their social standing.

With just one shot of the interior, we understand the family’s struggle to keep their heads above water – literally, it transpires later. Their home is a physical representation of hope and despair, good and bad, light and dark and, of course, the rich and poor – the divide at the heart of the film. That Joon-Ho is able to make this kind of stark social commentary with a single shot is incredible; few filmmakers could hope to be as effective and economical with their cinematography.

Bong, arguably the most influential filmmaker since the rise of new wave of Korean cinema in the mid 90s, transcends genre, mood and tone in his films – sometimes within a single scene. Here he introduces a touch of the absurd and the unsettling by having a neighbour urinate in plain view of the family and second-hand fumigation come in through the open window – this juxtaposition of the comical and the distressing is a feature of many Korean films.

Korean cinema often finds interesting ways of portraying class and wealth in this way. Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden from 2016 is another, following a conman and an orphaned pickpocket teaming up to defraud a wealthy Japanese woman from her inheritance. There’s also a trope where the locations themselves have great significance – not least Yeon Sang-ho’s staggeringly good zombie thriller Train to Busan and Bong’s first English language movie Snowpiercer.

Parasite is full of scenes that inspire, terrify and play with form, but this subtle opening is in some ways the most impactful of all. It’s the ideal way into Parasite, Bong Joon-Ho’s back catalogue, and Korean cinema at large.

Korean Klassics: Memories of Murder, The Handmaiden, Train to Busan

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