Parasite: a 21st Century Fable

Parasite: a 21st Century Fable

Parasite, the new film by Korean auteur director Bong Joon Ho, is not only gorgeous to look at, it presents a harrowing satire on the state of class inequity in the 21st century. It’s hard to think of a recent film that packs this much metaphorical power. Set in Korea in the midst of a Dickensian disparity of wealth—the Kims live in basement squalor, the Parks live in upscale serenity. But it could be anywhere in the first world. It is here, right now, and that very fact provides the razor edge of recognition audiences feel in response to this darkly comic/existential romp that snatched the Cannes Festival’s Palme d’Or away from Quentin Tarantino (See my review of Tarantino’s “Once upon a time in Hollywood”.)

Parasite is a tale told through two families: the luckless, unemployed Kim Family headed by the extraordinary Kang-Ho Song as the father, Kim Chung-Sook as his wife, Choi Woo-Shik as teenaged son “Kevin” and Park So-Dam as his crafty hacker sister “Jessica. Determined to claw their way out of their ghetto squalor, the Kims scheme their way (I won’t spoil it) into the lives of the wealthy Park Family, led by Cho Yeo-jeong as the naive, lovely Mrs. Park and Lee Sun Gyun as style-conscious CEO Mr. Park.

Before you know it the Kims, who’ll literally do anything to make money, manage to insinuate themselves into the heart of the Park’s splendid household. It is a symbiotic ecosystem made in the hellishly brilliant imagination of this director.

[Above we find the resourceful Kim siblings finding the best signal from their neighbor’s wifi right above the toilet.]

Mr. Kim becomes Mr. Park’s driver, Mrs. Kim is the new Park housekeeper after cleverly managing to get the former one fired (the scenes here are laugh out loud funny). The son becomes tutor (and lover) to the Park’s daughter, and his sister poses as an art therapist for the Park’s young son, who is obsessed with American Indians.

The house itself is a key player in what will reveal itself to be Bong’s sly-handed tale of  social inequity. An architectural masterpiece (designed by director Bong and made especially for the film) the sleek modernist house is laid out in interlocking levels. The living room’s enormous wall of glass overlooks an oasis of green lawn bordered by a manicured hedge. This hermetic world insulates the Parks from any unsightly social reality and makes a painful contrast to the mess and chaos of the Kim’s basement apartment. Most importantly to the director’s storytelling, the house also contains a secret passage into yet another domain—and a ghastly secret buried deep within the heart of lavish wealth.

Bong’s social commentary is never heavy handed, but it spares no one.

How this secret is discovered, what it contains, and where its layered metaphors lead are the elements driving a tsunami of loss, compassion, violence, joy, and ultimately a fairytale ending.

Parasite is powered by poetic cinematography, scored with Western classical music (another edgy dig at Korean social pretentions) and acted by a cast of brilliant players as capable of slapstick as heartbreak. I laughed my way through this film, even during its most terrifying scenes. The two families and the social codes they embody are turned inside out more than once, and never in predictable ways. All the actors are memorable, but especially lead player Kang-Ho Song, Mr. Kim [above], a frequent Bong collaborator. His broad face is roadmap of dashed dreams. As expressive as any Willem Dafoe, a savage/tender mirror reflecting Mr. Kim’s transformation—and his realization that his family’s larceny has triggered untold psychic damage. Nothing in Mr. Kim’s life has ever worked out, and Song’s face ultimately reveals despair on a Kierkegaardian scale. A great actor in a part worthy of his astonishing gifts.

Near the end of Parasite we find that just desserts are the main course of an outdoor birthday party for the spoiled Park son. And once the shocking visual pyrotechnics have cooled down, the film draws to a haunting, eloquent close a la Charles Dickens. Desperate and ephemeral dreams, of the sort that reveal how much the rich and the poor are mutually bound in a slow dance of need, greed, hypocrisy, and desire.

Parasite is a stunning cinematic fable, brilliant in every way, and for my money….unforgettable.

A Timeless “Our Town”

A Timeless “Our Town”

American playwright Thornton Wilder won a Pulitzer Prize for his finely-tuned masterpiece, Our Town. First produced in 1938—on a stage completely bare save for some chairs, two tables, and two ladders—it reveals the gritty, glorious, fuzzy reality of what Edmund Husserl called “lived time.” Not the expansive, beginning-middle-end time of fiction or daydreams. But the mundane, emotionally-troubled, worn time of everyday. The lived time that goes by so barely noticed that we, at least those of us over the age of 40, often find ourselves wondering out loud, “where does the time go?”

Thanks to skilled theater professional Suzanne Sturn, the culturati of Santa Cruz have a chance to remember just how true, unflinching, and humbling Our Town remains. Though most of the people in the opening week’s audiences had very likely seen or read the play in their high school years—like good wine, or almost anything by Shakespeare, this play just gets better, and more disturbingly beautiful with time.

Sturn herself plays the loquacious Stage Manager, the person who introduces the audience to the play, the town—Grovers Corners, New Hampshire—and the era, very early 20th century. With pitch perfect and insider wisdom, Sturn’s Stage Manager introduces us to the key residents of the town, the two families who will be joined together upon the marriage of one son George (Maxwell Bjork), and one daughter (Isabel Cruz). With unerring economy—gestures and vocal work do most of the heavy lifting in this production—Sturn moves the residents of Grovers Corners from early morning, to work and school, home again, and then long into the night.

We meet the milkman Howie Newsome (Chris Rich), the town doctor Dr. Gibbs (Dennis Hungridge), Mrs Gibbs (Susan Forrest) who is Emily’s mother, the town newspaper editor Mr. Webb (Bob Colter), and Mrs. Webb (a terrific Gail Borkowski) who is George’s mom. Everything moves smoothly, almost dreamily from the time when the young people are first discovering each other. The middle section of the play, “Love and Marriage,” deepens the awakening of human needs and desires, and introduces a few more delicious players, the town’s hard-drinking choir mistress (played by Mindy Pedlar), and jolly, philosophical Mrs. Soames (Hannah Eckstein).

In their New World Romeo and Juliet roles, courting each other from the tops of ladders, George and Emily unpeel the pain and awkwardness of youth just managing to reach something like agreement about a future together. It is so familiar, so unexpectedly new, so sparingly written, with absolutely not one word too many. Wilder is a humbling precedent for any emerging playwright.

And the final scene, at the town’s cemetery, delivers everything we know is coming. And yet we’re never quite ready for the last scene of Our Town. Sturn’s production utilizes space and time wisely. The players move up and down the aisles of the tiny theater, bringing their hopes, and ours, with them across the thresholds of mortality and whatever might lie beyond.

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” Emily asks, speaking for everyone who’s ever lived.

If there is anyone who might, against all odds, not know how the play unfolds, I won’t dwell on the final 30 minutes. It’s a surprise worth getting dressed for. But as I watched the play again, struggling for composure, I found myself watching it through my recent reading of George Saunders’ (another Pulitzer Prize winner) Lincoln in the Bardo. Somehow Wilder and Saunders each understood the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, and the need for those of us alive to be released by those we have loved, and lost. The thin, but ultimate membrane that separates life, death, and eternity.

The play itself is better than I could ever have hoped, or remembered. And this production does it justice, making all the right calls in terms of staging and timing. Kudos to the entire cast and director. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town plays at the Center Stage Theater, 1001 Center St., Santa Cruz through April 22. Rife with the magic of an imagined domain that only live theater can realize, this is a production worth two hours and 15 minutes of your time. And then some. Tickets here.

Bill Viola in Florence

Bill Viola in Florence

Here was a long-awaited experience—the chance to finally see the great Pontormo Visitation along with Bill Viola‘s haunting video response made five hundred years later. There in a single darkened room was the newly-restored Mannerist painting portraying the moment when Mary reveals to her cousin Elizabeth that she is pregnant. All the mystery and innuedo, the pungent psychological drama of what might have transpired is captured in their complex gaze, the swirling folds of the gowns, the torque of the bodies as they touch and yet turn away. Pontormo’s use of a single model for two of the figures adds a sparkle of surrealism to the moment. Mary’s mother Anne watches on, and an angel—also a witness—looks directly at us, viewers across the centuries.

On the adjacent wall, Viola’s larger-than-lifesize figures strain against time and space in hyper slow motion, re-imagining the meeting (the piece is called The Greeting) among Mary, Elizabeth, and a third woman. Gracefully surging skirts, arms reaching out, hands about to clasp, faces registering surprise, delight, and puzzlement, Viola’s work—which takes time to unfold— forces us deep into and beneath the minds of his subjects.

The slowed-down movements and gestures cast digital congianti onto the image painted by Bronzino’s teacher in the early 16th century. Movement inflects stillness with layers of temporal depth. Absolutely stunning. Viola’s forensic probing of an emotion-drenched moment retrieves fresh sensations we can almost taste.

The Pontormo is triumphant, its colors brilliant as if freshly painted. A commanding palette of draped robes challenges the crimson dress worn Viola’s Mary, the magenta shawl of Elizabeth.The two works now share a secret, at once timeless and yet produced across and through time; they murmur of the same epic event. They are in league with each other. Sono insieme.


I’ve taught some of the ideas and work of video artist Bill Viola in many of my courses over the past 15 years. And the more I reflect on his comments about his work, how it came into fruition, and the various influences upon them, the more my bond with his output deepens.

So it was with great anticipation that I took a break from operas in Vienna last month, hopped a plane across the alps, and headed for the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Curated with insight and largesse by Viola’s longtime collaborator and wife Kira Perov, with Arturo Galansino, the retrospective—Electronic Renaissance—honors the years Viola spent as a student and pioneer videographer in Florence. Indeed, the city opened its doors to Viola’s work, displaying pieces in multiiple sites from the Museo del Duomo to the entire Palazzo Strozzi.

The real attraction for me was the chance to see Viola’s large video panels mounted in proximity with the Renaissance and Mannerist works that evoked and inspired his shimmering works. And as I had hoped, in each of the palazzo’s vaulted chambers, Renaissance works and Viola’s response faced each other, called to each other, and reinforced each other’s creative origins.

Like many of you, I had seen several of Viola’s pieces years ago at The Getty, and was familiar with his technique of hyper attenuated movement. The smallest blink of an eye, or grasp of a hand—actually happening in seconds—is stretched and lengthened into many minutes. The gestures seems to develop and bloom as we watch. Time itself unfolds through Viola’s unblinking camera, and an unseen symbolic power is revealed.

I had wandered through the cool forest of Going Forth by Day when I saw one of its five panels in Milan several years ago. Walking with the lifesized travelers of the 30 foot LED installation as they proceeded slowly across a darkened room in Florence was to enter onto a pilgrim’s journey. From room to room, I was transfixed by the glowing installations. The Crossing, one of Viola’s most famous pieces, hung suspended in the center of one huge room. On one side of the screen a man is very slowly consumed by flames as the sound system roars and crackles. On the other side, the same man is gradually, bombarded by a torrent of water, a savage deluge into which his body ultimately disappears. All that remains is the echoing of water, drop by drop. The Crossing is the most literal portrayal of Viola’s inquiry into archetypal moments of transition, of change, of ephemerality. To be human, is to be always not quite what we are. Fire and water are two moments of a single event horizon.

The Emergence, based upon an enigmatic and solumn 15th century work by Masolino is the exhibition’s signature work, and one in which Viola documents the naked Christ figure, emerging (as in a resurrection) and also ascending from a watery death, tenderly wrapped by two women (his mother Mary and the Magdalen, as the new testament tells it).

Displaying over a period of 15 minutes, the work uses its fascinating beauty (we are always wondering how it was made, noticing the arduousness of the actors’ movements) to enunciate a mysterious truth. We are watching a familiar moment, a primal moment we know in our bodies. Yet that moment has no name. It is deeper than naming. Viola knows that. The piece is nothing short of profound, kept watch over by the original Masolino alterpiece.

Dinner of pappardelle and wild boar ragu, chased with Chianti Classico. Next morning I saw more Viola pieces at the Museo del Opera del Duomo, and was ensnared in the tragic mirroring of Donatello‘s carved wood Magdalen—a work of numbing sorrow with Viola’s Acceptance—a lifesize video of a wailing nude woman inundated with torrents of water. The carved wooden animal hides covering the Magdalen were exactly echoed by the roiling flood,  a stream of slow-motion tears. Stunned, I headed back for a second viewing of the Palazzo Strozzi show. Ten dollars was never better spent.

And here I walked into my own epiphany.  I moved from darkened room to darkened room on Viola’s shamanic journey. The exhibition had cast a hypnotic spell, into which I, the seeker, descended deeper and deeper until I came to the room with a piece I had known about for many years—Catherine’s Room. Five panels showing the stages of a life, the time of life (youth, middle-age, etc.) symbolized by the view of a tree outside Catherin’e window. In her youth, the tree is beginning to bloom. As she grows into maturity, the tree is seen awash with green leaves, the sun high in the sky. As she grows older, the sky outside grows darker, the tree’s leaves fall. In the final panel, we watch as she makes her bed and lies down in it pulling up the covers. The window is dark, night has fallen.

Each panel is also a video piece, so we can watch each image unfold in slow-motion time. And we can take it all in at once, embrace the entire polyptych as a whole.

In the next to last panel, Catherine begins to light a large array of votive candles. One by one, each candle is patiently lit until the whole image is ablaze with flickering light. Going back and forth among the panels I suddenly realized that Viola was using his Buddhist savvy (agenda?) to reveal the life of a saint (a medieval panel of St. Catherine of Siena’s life faces the Viola installation). But he also showed me much more. All the moments, milestones, events of a human life occur simultaneously. Not sequentially. Everything is now. Change, movement, youth, age, birth, death—are all illusions, mere words. Catherine’s Room is every room. Her activities occur outside linear time.

I also realized the obviousness of my response. And its profundity.

There is more I can say about this exhibition. But for now, this will have to suffice. I’m still shaken by the effect of this particular suite of images—the past masters, and Bill Viola’s mastery.

Bill Viola:Electronic Renaissance. Through July 23, 2017 at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. If you’re anywhere near Italy in the next month, see this show!

On the Other Hand

On the Other Hand

My bags are always packed!

To go from here to there is to indulge in a blend of aesthetic schizophrenia, wanderlust, and bad faith. Insisting that I love exactly where I live, I still climb onto a plane roughly once a year to become whatever the next large foreign city can make of me. Without giving up what I have, I crave what can only be gained sitting at an exotic (df. of foreign origin) table.

The Other Place vs Home. Each has exactly what the other lacks. The foreign city has architecture, history, and the cultural depth that only a critical mass of people, talent, and creative pressure can create. [It might also offer the spectacle of Korean newlyweds posing for nuptial photos with the Uffizi in the background.]

    The small seaside town has coziness, hominess, familiarity. Its smaller size allows for intimacy, a sense of geographical mastery that comes with manageable scale. And it is home, a place one has lived in for years. It contains friends, lovers, colleagues—all those whose ideas and eccentricities help construct your own life.

Somewhere in the exact middle of these two attractive places the wanderer is suspended, not wanting to upset that balance, not wanting to have to choose.

I travel partly in order to see my home from a clearer vantage point, and nothing clarifies like distance (Antonioni knew that. So did Hemingway, and Durrell.) But also to feast and fill up upon the riches of the other—another time, another cultural sensibility, another way of moving, talking, and listening.

The smell of frankincense that fills the high altar of a cathedral on Sunday mornings speaks to my subconscious DNA. Was I a priest in a past life? The sound of church bells, counting out the hours, calling people to prayer, announcing this or another civic event, is part of the atmospheric soundtrack of European cities. A soundtrack missing from seaside California.

Admiring the bravura of men’s fashion in Italy I am forced to grasp the casual attire of coastal California. I see no baseball caps in Vienna, and I instantly understand the climate, the sun, the outdoor lifestyle that produces our dress code. It’s harder to see when you are in the midst, easy to spot via the extreme contrast of a metropolitan European city founded thousands of years ago by Celts.

I discovered BBC when I was in Paris several decades ago. Even though I loved French TV, the mesmerizing commercials, and pungently-dramatic soap operas, I wanted to hear some of my native language. That’s when I realized that American TV carried on as if there were no weather issues in Africa. No one mentioned incidents in the Sudan, or Myanmar. Chinese business deals weren’t given a second of air time. Bulgaria didn’t exist. The world into which I had traveled was not only larger, but my own country and its media prejudices seemed provincial by comparison.

Without question we see ourselves and our cultural assumptions more clearly from afar. Travel removes me from work. I leave my laptop at home. I am frugal with my emails. Here and now details tend to define each day. I visit a museum in Florence and find it filled with engaged high school groups. I visit a Monet show in San Francisco and find it filled with white-haired nostalgics. The youthful energy and passion for the arts in Europe is both encouraging (I envy the Europeans) and sad (I am brusquely reminded of the inattention to art of the past by student-aged Americans). Yes, opera is expensive, but the queue for cheap standing room is a block-long in Vienna. All young people. Outside the US, museum tickets are inexpensive and everyone seems to take advantage of the sensory feast and stimulus to the imagination provided by innovatively-curated exhibitions. And no, I don’t mean simply parading out the content of a wealthy woman’s closet and calling it an art exhibition.

Does travel expand our consciousness? Does the Pope suffer fools?

Time Travel Conflicts

Time Travel Conflicts

There are many forms of being in conflict with oneself, but few are as universal, if irrational, as that feeling you have after a satisfying trip far away from your everyday life. For two weeks I was lucky enough to be in Vienna and, briefly, Florence.  By the end of the richly rewarding journey of sensory pleasures—opera, concerts, art exhibitions, regional cuisine, architecture—it was time to come home. Yet a mere 24 hours after being back, and after soaking up the enjoyment of my sweetheart, my own bed, the foods I love….I longed to be back in a great European city that could not possibly be more different than the small seaside town in California where I live.

What is that about?

Nothing feels better than coming home after a stretch of time in which each day has required strategizing over where you will eat, whether your grasp of German and Italian (or whatever non-native language) will suffice without causing howls of derision, walking until your feet scream, struggling with jet lag, and dining with strangers or alone with only your cell phone (or a book!) for company. Being at home means never having to say “come se dice “clueless” in Italiano.” Being at home means not having to endure the specific humiliation of being handed a menu in English when you’ve worked your butt off to master restaurant German. Being at home means not having to negotiate hieroglyphic subway signage, taxi prices, the ridiculously small size of street names on maps that you’re trying not to be seen using.

But as Sartre liked to remind us, nothing makes us feel as alive as struggle. Nor does the successful result leave as lasting an impact as when we had to work for it. Adversity is bracing. And that sense of quest, of having to work for the cold beer at the top of the hill, or that first glimpse of the Duomo after a 12-hour plane trip—these are what sweeten both the present moment, and that lasting memory of travel.

And then there’s the slammed against the wall discomfort and disarray of long-distance travel. The customs lines, the dishevelment of TSA, the spatial cram and compromise of airplane seating, the out-of-body haze of having been semi-conscious for 20 hours and then having to check into a hotel with something close to dignity. [A sidebar you’ll enjoy: as my Slovakian cabbie approached the inner city of Vienna, he was stopped at the bridge over the Donau canal. According to the polizei, all roads to the old city were closed. It was a Friday, the end of April. No explanations. My poor driver was apologetic but he had to let me out right there, with only a few indications of where I should go—straight ahead, turn right, then another left to my hotel. This is after SFO to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Vienna, 15 hours of travel and loaded down with one huge rolling suitcase and another carry-on case. I had to actually roll both cases through the streets of Vienna, ask for directions twice, then go the long way through throngs of student tour groups and people with selfie sticks all clustered around the huge cathedral, just attempting to stay on my feet. Arms aching, utterly wiped out, I made it to my hotel. Not my best travel memory.]

There’s more to ponder here. Once jetlag and the utter exhaustion of the long flight wore off, I began to walk the streets, learn where my favorite new cafes were, meet up with fellow opera-lovers for the many evenings of great music, revisit museums I hadn’t seen since grad school. In other words, I began residency in a new world. I had carved out yet another life, a new identity in which I was psychologically at least in two places at once.

And that may be the key to this double bind, this longing to be home while wishing to be traveling again. Going far enough away from familiar scenes that you are forced to see differently, move differently, speak differently, creates a new existence. I had extended my life by two weeks, carving out more time and more space while still being my “real” self in my “real” identity.

Travel gives us not only new spaces, it gives us more time. And the illusion of an expanded life. I can live in two places at once. At least for a while—as long as my feet (and my money) hold out.

Lion

Lion

Directed by Garth Davis and adapted from the true story “A Long Way Home,” Lion tells the fairytale saga of a young Indian boy, Saroo Brierley, who becomes lost a thousand miles away from his village, and is miraculously adopted by an Australian couple. After many harrowing misadventures as well as endearing capers, the film hands us over to the grown-up Saroo, now in college in Melbourne. Though his Australian family have been loving and supportive, Saroo increasingly burns with the need to find his Indian home, to find his mother and brother and let them know that he is alive and well.

That’s the set-up— but the film is by no stretch simply a beautifully told tale of a “lost boy” and his quest for home. Powered by urgent cinematography of chaotic Calcutta and the breathtaking coastline of Tasmania, Lion is graced with a suite of outstanding performances. Especially those of captivating young Sunny Pawar as the five-year-old Saroo, and Dev Patel as 26-year-old Saroo—but also a never-better Nicole Kidman as Saroo’s adoptive mother and Rooney Mara as Saroo’s college girlfriend.

lion_6It’s always tricky casting two strong actors as a single character, the young version and then later the character as an adult. Tricky because as we fall in love with the first version—in this case the astonishingly poised and playful Pawar—it can be wrenching to accept the character newly matured in the formidable screen presence of Patel, who is all grown up from his days stealing scenes in Slumdog Millionaire and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. An exciting actor, the adult Patel exudes surprising sex appeal and knows how to use one of the strongest, most expressive faces in film. Caravaggio paints Shiva.

Reviewers have made much of this film as a tear-jerker, destined to reduce even the most jaded viewer to jelly. Certainly it can do that. But it’s complicated. There’s a Huck Finn quality to the nightmarish odyssey of the little boy, who goes out with his brother to seek any kind of work that will help keep themselves and their mother in food. He leaves one night with the beloved older brother, and ends up at a train station where the brother tells him to stay put. Little Saroo falls asleep and when he wakes up the brother is gone and he’s completely alone at the huge railway platform. Jumping into an empty train coach, he sleeps again—such a delicious fairytale—and when he wakes the train is moving. And it keeps on moving for days, all the while carrying him farther and farther away from home. Since he’s only a child, he has no way of knowing what has happened and where he is. And so things begin to unfold.

In true Dickens fashion, some of the strangers little Saroo meets are kind and helping. Others have darker purposes. These form the heart of the first half of the film, and watching the little boy running to, and from, a variety of situations is both nerve-wracking and exciting. The utterly darling Pawar has us in the palm of his hand and then his life suddenly blooms with the love and care of his new parents a world away.

devNicole Kidman knocked me out in all of her scenes, but the one in which she explains to the grown-up Saroo just why she wanted to adopt him will destroy you. Even as Virginia Woolf in The Hours she was never this present, this entirely focused upon a single idea as she is here. (There’s also a second adopted Indian brother who has “issues,” and even in a fairytale the path to maturity never runs smoothly.)

Once Saroo/Patel begins his Google-enhanced quest to pinpoint where he might have gotten on the train all those years ago, and struggles to locate his home village, the film gains intensity. Of course we want to see how he will find his home, whether his family still lives, and we can taste the reunion he so needs. But somewhere in there a generic ending starts to form itself. Not every stitch ends up in a neat crochet, a few corners of credibility are cut, and yet. And yet. The resolution of the quest is as satisfying as any epic tale can get.

The film was loaded with highest quality everything. Story, cinematography, acting, music, direction—I left feeling better than I had when I arrived. Lion delivered everything a movie should. And I loved it.

(Only one of those obligatory “true story” film endings, where they show footage of the real people upon whose lives the film is based, threatened to destroy the spectacular saga we’d just seen. Note to directors: don’t do this. Resist the cornball desire to show us “the way they are today.” Just don’t do it.]