"Parasite" By South Korean Director, Bong Joon Ho: Income Inequality At The Movies

A poor family struggles to get by in their dreary basement apartment in Bong Joon Ho’s new movie “Parasite.”Neon, via Associated Press

I thought that the South Korean director and screenwriter Bong Joon Ho’s “Snowpiercer” was about as bleak and disturbing a vision of income inequality and class warfare as I could imagine. Then I saw his new movie, “Parasite,” which opened in three theaters — two in Los Angeles, one in Manhattan — on Friday. (It will open more widely in the weeks to come.)

The winner of the top prize at the Cannes film festival this year, it’s daring, surprising and frequently mesmerizing — all of which is true of “Snowpiercer,” too. Like “Snowpiercer,” it’s also oppressively heavy-handed. But Bong’s imagination, the intricacy of his plotting, his talent for braiding disparate tones and his visual panache can’t be denied.

And perhaps no moviemaker in the world has plugged into this political moment in quite the way that he has. He captures the willful blindness of many economically blessed people and the flimsily lidded rage of those left behind in a manner so bold that you can’t shake it off. And he extrapolates those dynamics to disastrous, violent, even apocalyptic scenarios.

“Snowpiercer” (2013) is an English-language movie that situates the surviving inhabitants of an unendurably frigid earth in a long, endlessly moving train where the front cars are realms of extraordinary pampering and the rear lend new meaning to steerage. “Parasite” is in Korean but is similarly obsessed with tiers. One of the two families at its center lives in a dreary basement apartment, with a view of the legs of a man who urinates just outside their sliver of a window; the other family lives on a hill, in a contemporary glass marvel that both overlooks and blends into the verdant lawn and splendid trees outside. The story, by turns darkly comic and just plain dark, concerns what happens when the underprivileged family maneuvers its way into the life of the privileged one.

I saw “Parasite” at the Hamptons International Film Festival last weekend, which afforded me an advance peek at a range of award-chasing year-end movies that have generated significant buzz. I couldn’t warm to “Jojo Rabbit,” a Nazi Germany comedy (yes, you read that right) whose 10-year-old protagonist has a running dialogue with his imaginary friend: Adolf Hitler. I was also left cold by “The Two Popes,” which imagines a different dialogue — between Pope Benedict (Anthony Hopkins, excellent) on the eve of his resignation and Pope Francis (Jonathan Pryce, ditto) just before he was elevated to that perch. Although it wisely uses the amazing architecture and scenery of Vatican City and the Italian countryside, it’s an inert affair that feels more like a stage play (and in fact originated as one).

I preferred the guaranteed crowd pleaser “Ford v Ferrari,” in which Matt Damon and Christian Bale give hugely charismatic performances as the duo behind a gigantic American company’s attempt to snatch racecar glory from the smaller Italian enterprise that was hoarding it.

And there’s much to recommend “Marriage Story,” about the way in which the initially humdrum separation of a New York theater-world couple (Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson) turns angry, raw and profoundly painful. Driver is outstanding — some Oscar handicappers favor him for Best Actor — and there’s an unforgettably funny, acerbic turn by Laura Dern as Johansson’s no-nonsense divorce attorney.

I offer those thoughts in case they help you plan your late fall and early winter movie going.