Poornima Manco

Author

Films

Parasite

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Last night I sat and watched ‘Parasite’ again. Yes, the same Korean film that won the Oscar this year and what a fitting winner it was too. The first time I’d seen this movie on a plane headed to India, and been shaken to the core by it. This multi-genre marvel with themes that intersected and overlapped, left me awed by its sheer complexity, by how black humour segued seamlessly into social commentary and the inevitable tragedy at the end. How, at the very heart of it and despite all indications to the contrary, Bong Joon-ho’s film was about hope. Hope itself being a double-edged sword with its capacity to wound and destroy.

Before you proceed any further, please be warned that this blog post contains many spoilers. So, if you haven’t seen the film yet and don’t want any details revealed in advance, go ahead and surf away.

As a writer, I am an avid consumer of content from various media. It enriches and informs my own work in many many ways. However, a particular quirk of mine is the inability to shut off the analytical side of my brain which sifts through everything to understand themes and patterns, their usage towards building a story and achieving the desired climax. Bong’s extraordinary talent lies in the layering of multiple ideas with a single motif as the objective.

Layers of society are portrayed in the three families depicted in the film. The Parks are representative of the wealthy upper classes, living in airy open-space mansions with chauffeurs and housekeepers at their disposal, the ability to hire tutors or buy foreign goods and toys for their children and organise picnics and parties on a whim. They are the aspirational top tier of society. Nice and naive – both because of the advantages that wealth affords them.

The Kim family, on the other hand, live in a small semi-basement apartment typical of the poorer sections of the Korean suburbs. They drift from job to job, subsisting on minimum wage, eager to grasp at any opportunity that comes their way. It is no wonder then that they have no compunctions about worming their way into the employment of the Parks, using underhand means, replacing the previous employees through a combination of lies, fraud and deceit.

Bong’s treatment of the two families is even-handed. Each is a victim of their circumstances, each believes themselves to be functioning in exactly the way they should be given their station in life.

It’s when a third family is added to the mix that things begin to get muddier. If it is at all possible, there is a tier that lies even below that of the poverty inhabited by the Kims. It is that of the previous housekeeper Moon-gwang’s husband, Geun-sae, who has lived in an underground bunker beneath the Parks’ house, not having seen sunlight in four years.

When the bottom two tiers clash, there is no honour amongst thieves. Each is capable and more than willing to destroy the other in a race for survival, while the top tier remains oblivious to the internecine wars beneath them. This fundamental disconnect is once again underlined in the conversation that Mrs Park has with a friend inviting her over for an impromptu party on their lawns, commenting on how lush and green it is after a night of unprecedented rainfall that (unknown to her) has flooded the Kims’ semi-basement with sewage, making it completely uninhabitable.

The differences are little and large, setting each group apart from the other. From housing to food to body odour, each signifies a societal placement several rungs afar. Can these distances be traversed? Can the scholar’s rock presented to the Kim family bring them the wealth it promises?

Hope drives the film to its conclusion, even as tragedy unfolds on the lawns of the beautiful Parks’ home. In an unexpected twist, Mr Kim drives a knife into Mr Park, a knee-jerk reaction to the lack of respect that has underscored every perfectly civil interaction of theirs. A fundamental disrespect for those that lie below, even while they serve, accommodate and aim to please. Mr Kim’s escape into the bunker previously inhabited by Geun-sae is his falling even deeper into the squalor and ignominy that he has tried so hard to climb out of. His son, Ki-woo’s dreams of being wealthy enough to someday buy the same house and rescue his father from its depths, are a painful reminder that while hope can fuel a fantasy, the daily grind of poverty will irrevocably douse those flames.

The ultimate question is: who is the parasite? Geun-sae who survives on the food secreted to him by his housekeeper wife, the Kim family who aspire to a larger share of the proverbial pie, or the Parks who cannot live without the labours of those who wait upon them?

In the end, we are all parasites in one way or another. But hope is the largest parasite of all, for it feeds upon so much, offering so little in return.

Watch this wonderful film, if you haven’t already! If you have, let me know what you thought in the comments below.

The sweetest revenge

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I’ll start by saying that I was fully prepared to hate it. I’d read enough bad reviews about ‘Once upon a time in Hollywood’ to have preconditioned my mind to not like the movie. However, I was on a long haul flight and the film offerings were nothing worth getting excited over. This one piqued my curiosity and I started to watch it.

I am not new to Quentin Tarantino’s films. Just out of teens, I’d watched ‘Natural Born Killers’ with my friend and been riveted as well as disturbed by the violence in the movie. ‘Pulp Fiction’ though, just blew my mind, it was that good! ‘Kill Bill’ I watched on television when there was nothing else to watch, and despite myself, got sucked into the story. The point is, I am not unfamiliar with his oeuvre. Accusations of misogyny and gratuitous violence aside, there is no doubt that Tarantino has earned his stripes as a maverick filmmaker.

So, what about the people who’d said to me that this movie was one long yawn-fest? Without discounting their opinions, I tried watching it with a completely open mind and I was not disappointed.

A bit of background for those who do not know what this movie is about: In 1969, the horrific, brutal and senseless murders of Sharon Tate and her friends rocked the Hollywood community. Committed by Charles Manson’s ‘family’ members, a cult that believed so implicitly in their leader’s vision that they were ready to kill for him, it shook Hollywood to its core. Particularly as Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s wife had been eight and a half months pregnant, and despite begging for the life of her unborn baby, been stabbed fatally with her blood being used to write ‘pig’ on the front door.

In Tarantino’s retelling, he’s kept to most of the truth, combining the fictional lives of his protagonists played by Leonardo di Caprio and Brad Pitt, with the very real lives of Tate and co. In splicing real film footage from Tate’s career, he once again bucks the trend of recreating everything from scratch. This does not divert from the storytelling. 

A washed-up actor and his stunt double are best buddies, having been through thick and thin together. Rick Dalton’s career is on the wane, and despite having bought property in Hollywood Hills, and being a neighbour to the hot new director Roman Polanski and his beautiful actress wife, Sharon Tate, Di Caprio’s Dalton is well aware that his glory days are behind him. In his downward slide is his pal and Man Friday, Cliff Booth, played by Pitt. Their career trajectory is also an examination of the rise and fall of the genre of the Westerns, and the lure of the terrible Spaghetti Westerns that flooded Hollywood in the ’60s.

Tarantino’s homage to Hollywood is heavy-handed and ham-fisted in many places, but his love for the industry shines through regardless. In this long (and sometimes rambling) tale, he examines the disparate states of human behaviour. There is Dalton’s self-awareness that his time is nearly up, there is Tate’s excitement in her rising star, there is the grime and the grunge of Manson’s cult and the shadowy side to their encampment, there is the muted loyalty of Pitt’s Booth and there are also many many digs at film stars past.

Can this retelling be taken as gospel? Of course not! Fiction is fiction after all, even if its basis may be fact.

Yes, Tarantino’s women are imperfect (cue: they snore!), nearly everyone uses profanity, Tate is portrayed as a vacuous, sweet blonde, his men are unlikely heroes and the violence when it arrives, is vicious, merciless and savage. These are all classic Tarantino tropes, and for a first-timer, they can be pretty shocking.

But look beyond that and you will see that what he is really trying to do, is change the course of history. In circumventing what really happened, by placing his protagonists as the obstacles to the murders, he is reimagining a more innocent world where evil was taken down before it could destroy beauty, innocence and life. 

Sure, that’s not what happened. But it could have.

In the distance between reality and Tarantino’s fiction lies his imaginary revenge, a sweet and futile attempt to alter the past.

What next?

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Two deaths have shaken me enormously in the last fortnight. It has led me to once again question why humanity is plumbing new depths. Why life is not sacred and death can spawn such vitriol.

 

(i)

I was away on holiday when the Florida school shooting happened. It was just another news item, and I read through it quickly, consigning it to the pile of mass shootings that have become too passé to even comment on. Tragic, preventable and a waste of life are thoughts that flitted through my mind as I moved on to the next news item.

It’s only when I returned home to discover that one of the girls murdered that day was a colleague’s daughter that it really hit home.

Let me explain: It’s all too easy to become inured to tragedy. After all, tragedy surrounds us everyday in so many guises. If we let everything get to us, we would be emotional wrecks unable to function. Therefore, as a coping mechanism, we start to build walls around our hearts, allowing few things to truly penetrate and hurt. This way, we function and also help where we can, in whatever way possible, without any emotional entanglement with the cause.

However, now and again, when something like this happens, one is shaken to the core. Gina Montalto was not just a colleague’s daughter, she was also the same age as my daughter. Suddenly I was one with her parents. Feeling their earth shattering grief as my own, asking the same question as them, “Why?!!”

How is it that a nineteen year old teenager cannot buy alcohol in America, and yet is able to go out and buy a semi-automatic weapon with the sole purpose of killing and maiming? Is life really so cheap that to this day the NRA (National Rifle Association) refuses to allow the law to be changed in any way, to make procurement of these weapons more difficult? Is it easier to arm the teachers than to disarm the potential killers? Are thoughts and prayers the only feeble platitudes we can offer?

It is laughable that providing teachers with weapons is seen as an effective strategy. As an interesting meme pointed out, if your child hits another with a stick, would you take the stick away or provide the other child with a stick too?

Boycotts and protests notwithstanding, real change can only come if the inherent ideology is challenged. For most Americans, ‘the right to bear arms’ is enshrined in the Constitution. As per the Second Amendment, this right allows any citizen to challenge the State if their freedom is threatened. Yet, look at the times this Constitution was written in. Could the Founding Fathers have foreseen how this right has mutated and violated the very freedoms they were trying to protect? How about the right to be able to receive an education without the threat of death looming over children? How about the right to a carefree childhood that does not involve lockdown drills and active shooter awareness in five year olds?

Constitutions are formulated by people. Human, fallible and mortal people. It is for the people of these times to decide what needs retaining, what needs amending and what needs eliminating.

As children all over America start to join the movement, holding up placards that read #MENEXT? , we have to examine our consciences and decide which freedom matters more.

If you would like to donate to the Gina Rose Montalto scholarship fund, please follow the link below:

https://www.gofundme.com/ginamontalto

 

(ii)

On Saturday last week came the devastating news of a young, beautiful and fabulously talented actress Sridevi’s death. First reports indicated that she had died of a cardiac arrest in her hotel bathroom. She was in Dubai to attend her nephew’s wedding, and had seemingly collapsed whilst getting ready for a dinner date with her husband.

At 54, Sridevi was still in her prime. After a hiatus of fifteen years, she had returned to Indian cinema in a triumphant comeback vehicle, ‘English Vinglish’. She was very selective about the films she was choosing in her second innings, and was coming up trumps each time.

Having started her film career at the tender age of 4, she had acted in over 300 films. Straddling South Indian cinema as well as Hindi films successfully, she was widely acknowledged as the first female Superstar of Indian cinema.

Her untimely death came as a huge shock to everyone.

Almost instantaneously the rumour mill went into overdrive. ‘She was too thin’, ‘it was all that plastic surgery’, ‘her heart must have been affected by the number of times she was administered general anaesthetic’, ‘she took far too many diet pills’, ‘she was anorexic’, ‘she exercised too much’, ‘her lip surgery had gone wrong’, ‘she was trying too hard to turn back the clock’ etc etc etc.

Now understandably, people were trying to find a cause that could explain away why a seemingly healthy woman would suddenly die in this manner. Admittedly, a celebrity’s life is public fodder. Yet, this rush to attack, accuse and cast her as the poster girl of vanity was already verging on poor taste. Worse was to come.

The following day it emerged that the cause of death was ‘accidental drowning’.  Traces of alcohol were discovered in her bloodstream. No crime there. Yet, once again, conflicting news stories jostled with each other for top slot. ‘She didn’t drink’, ‘she was an alcoholic’, ‘it was murder’, ‘it was suicide’, ‘she had money troubles’, ‘her husband was in financial ruin’ – gossip, rumours, innuendos, falsehoods and fabrications that not once took into account the feelings of her family, least of all her young, teenage daughters.

Morphed pictures of her in a bathtub were circulated on social media. Overflowing tubs were shown on the news. This was the respect accorded to a woman who had contributed almost her entire life to the film industry?

Even as I write this, I have received three pictures of her dead body, with cotton wool stuck up her nostrils. Enough already!

It’s patently obvious, that we have no respect for human life. Can we not, at the very least, show some respect after death?

An acquaintance of mine who loves Instagram, once posted a blow by blow account of his father’s funeral on there. From the dead body being carried to the pyre, to him setting his father alight, there was no privacy allowed to the departed one. Everything was grist to the mill of his public persona. Was stooping that low really necessary? Were a few hundred likes more important than giving his father the respect he deserved?

Indian media is facing a backlash from the public that has finally woken up to the fact that there is news, and then there is yellow journalism. Screeching tabloids, eyeball grabbing headlines have no place in decent society.

However Sridevi died, the sadness lies in her untimely demise. She had so much more to offer to celluloid, as also to her family.  Instead of ghoulish conspiracy theories, character assassinations and mud slinging, let us celebrate her rich and varied legacy in films. Let her, for goodness’ sake, rest in peace.

For the rest of us, who remain mystified by her death;  remember death is not a mystery. It is a destination. Who knows when our stop arrives?