Staying Fit
Rating: R
Run time: 131 minutes
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Stars: Song Kang-ho, Woo-sik Choi, So-dam Park, Yeoh-jeong Jo, Sun-kyun Lee
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Bong Joon-ho, 50, the first-ever Korean winner of the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, lives up to the hype with this genius genre-bender. Set in Bong's native South Korea, Parasite is a thrilling, twisted tale of two cities that contrasts two families: one rich, one poor.
The unemployed Kims struggle to survive in a stinky semi-basement in un-genteel poverty with a view of drunks peeing in an alley. Up the hill and across town, the posh Parks spread out in an architect-designed split-level villa — not so different from the elite family compound of last year's best foreign language winner Roma.
But unlike Roma, this film doesn't surrender to any black-and-white nostalgia about love and mutual respect between the haves and have-nots. Bong, the director of the outlandish and intelligent films The Host and Snowpiercer, quickly escalates the class warfare inherent in the two clans’ relative places, emphasizing the Upstairs, Downstairs inequality.