The movie tells the story of how the extremely poor Jin family was hired by a wealthy family through fraud. Like a "parasite" that lives on a host, it eats away at the wealthy family. As a class-themed film, the story setting of this film is relatively simple, but there are metaphors everywhere in the plot clues. The composition of the picture and the use of light and shadow tones also build metaphors for the film.
Audio-visual language expresses the character's situation
At the beginning of the film, we see a window close to the ground. The camera sinks further and the character enters the mirror. Through this shot, we immediately understand the character's poor background. The camera directly tells everyone that this person's social status is as low as possible. This seems to be one of Bong Joon-ho's favorite techniques, and it was fully used in " Snowpiercer ".
The son is trying to connect to the free network of the surrounding store. The camera position here is slightly higher than the character and tilted slightly downward, which makes the character appear short and weak. Although this is a basic photography technique, Bong Joon-ho used it superbly.
When the son goes to the rich man's house, he has to walk up the mountain. These two shots, first looking down and then looking up, mark a change in the character. When he first enters a wealthy family, the camera moves upward, looking up at the character as if he is entering upper class society.
This shot could have been shot from the front so that you can see the character's expression, but Bong Joon Ho chose to stay consistent and shoot from behind to let the character move into the light. Light is the basis of photography, and the use of light in Bong Joon-ho's films is very simple and straightforward, either there is light or there is no light. When the son went to the rich man's house, he left the darkness and walked towards the light. When he went up the mountain, he also stood in the brightest part of the picture. When he walked into the house, the light was very bright, covering the entire picture. The audience did not see the house at first, only the bright light of a better future. The movie not only tells the story and themes through action and dialogue, but the images also further advance the metaphor of the movie.
Picture composition distinguishes characters' class status
Composition is also a form of language expression in movies. Different angles and scenes are used to form natural or innovative compositions. From the visual sense, you can experience the metaphorical creative thinking that the director wants to express. When
's son meets his friend, both roads in the shot are uphill, and the two meet at the lowest point. Every shot of returning home on a rainy day is downhill, as if the entire city was built vertically. Of course, height is not the only theme in the movie. Another theme is line, the line that distinguishes the rich from the poor. When the son first meets the mistress of a rich family, a window composed of two pieces of glass is cut, one side is the housekeeper and the son, and the other side is the queen. There are many such lines in the
shot. When the hostess takes her son upstairs, the central stair pillar separates the two. When the hostess decides to hire her son as a tutor, the camera moves and the son finally crosses this line. This line appears and disappears many times in the film, representing whether poor families are accepted by wealthy families.
Symbolized visual metaphor
A friend gave his son a stone. The son believed that the stone could bring good luck. The stone became his belief and the stone that weighed on his heart.
After his home was submerged in sewage, the son stood alone in the water holding a stone, using the flickering light to show the inner changes of the character. At this time, the son became disappointed with the stone.
This is very similar to Wong Kar Wai 's movie "Days of Being Wild". Andy Lau During the conversation with his brother on the train, light was used to shine on Andy Lau, showing his ups and downs of mood at this time and the failure and confusion of his love. In the movie
, the young son smells the same smell on his father and mother. The male protagonist also smells this smell on the sofa at home and on the subway. At this time, in addition to potentially revealing their identities, the smell is also used as a symbol, which represents the poverty of the Jin family.
John Truby writes that a symbol creates a resonance, like ripples in a pond, and each time it appears, as you repeat the symbol, the ripples expand and reverberate in the mind of the viewer, often without their awareness.
The landscape stone is just such a symbol. The landscape stone appears six times in the film. The first time the son receives the stone and begins to boldly pursue his ideal wealth and status. When the Jin family seems to be heading towards some kind of success, the stone appears again. When a drunk man peed at the door, the son grabbed a stone from the table and walked towards the door. At this time, the stone represented the son's ambition.
When the stone appeared for the third time, the Jin family was in a dilemma where their identity was almost discovered. The son found the stone in the turbid sewage. The fourth time the stone appeared was when he was sleeping in the gymnasium. His son fell asleep holding the stone, which also represents his unwillingness to give up the hope of changing his class and changing his life status. The fifth time
appeared was when the son brought a stone to a party and wanted to use this weapon to deal with people who threatened his dream. At this time, the stone became a symbol of destruction. The last time was when the son put the stone into the water and sank. This was actually a picture in the son's imagination, which meant that he had given up his unrealistic fantasies and found himself.
This is not the first time that Bong Joon-ho has discussed the theme of class struggle, but compared to "Snowpiercer" where good and evil are divided, "Parasite" discusses this issue in a more detailed way and explores how people do evil deeds, and allows the audience to decide who is the villain of the story.
The movie uses the Ki-taek family as representatives of the greed of the lower class and President Park's family, which is parasitic on the upper class. It reveals human nature in the face of desire and pursuit of interests, and shows the embarrassment and misery of people at the bottom of society when facing difficulties in life.
uses the core of the absurd fable for the plot based on reality, and supplements it with the use of basic audio-visual techniques to add an indispensable part to the construction of the metaphor system in the movie, making the metaphor system of the movie more natural, better conveying the deeper emotional expression in the director's film, and more prominently conveying the thinking about social poles and polarization!
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