Hot on the heels of its sweep at the 2020 Academy Awards, Bong Joon-ho’s much-lauded Parasite returns to the big screen – this time in a stunning monochromatic edition, putting this year’s masterpiece in a new light.
Parasite (image taken from the colour version)
At this point, you’ve most likely already seen the Best Picture winner or have no desire to. If you’ve somehow been living under a rock, Parasite recounts the story of the Ki’s – a poor, disheveled family of four tucked into a dingy little living space – as they infiltrate the household of the wealthy Park family one-by-one. It’s a dark satire that puts themes the likes of class, wealth, family, and social divide, under razor-sharp scrutiny through the lens of this rich narrative.
Whilst the meat and bones of the story remain in-tact, this rendition of the film re-tools the aesthetic into a black and white palette – with Joon-ho and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo spending a lot of time going back and re-grading the whole thing. After the likes of Mad Max: Fury Road – Black and Chrome and Logan Noir, major films getting a visual cleanse seems like a new trend. However, such an exercise does beg the question: is it necessary? Whilst clear effort and consideration has gone into the re-grading of every single frame (more so than just a new lick of paint, or loss of paint in this case), the drawbacks of a Parasite cut in black and white sadly outweigh the benefits of this re-designed cut. On this new version, Joon-ho reportedly described his thought-process by saying “when I think of the classics, they’re all in black and white. So I had this idea that if I turned my films into black and white then they’d become classics”. Admittedly, the new aesthetic does give Parasite a timeless feel – with the original cut already feeling so Hitchcockian in nature, the desaturation really just embellishes that idea further – and it complements the themes and settings well. Plus it does look good – colour or not. Considering the film starts out focused on the Ki family, the black and white re-enforces their poor state of life; it adds to the scuzzy, kitchen sink feeling of their scenes – especially when they’re all huddled around their small toilet trying to leach off the free Wi-Fi – and it really just elevates the tragedy and awfulness of their situation early on. The flood scene especially has a whole new layer to it.
However, the same can’t be said when the narrative shifts into the Park household. And sadly this is where most of the film stays. The luxurious texture and visuals of the decorum feel lost; the mansion was so carefully designed and the rich colours really went a long way in giving their wealth a sense of emphasis which is mostly lost now. It takes away from the dimension that the colour grade had previously and suddenly puts the Ki family and Park family on a similar standing – which goes against the film’s whole viewpoint and ideology. Joon-ho also said one of the decisions behind the monochromatic take was to make the divide between the two families more distinctive but, if anything, the opposite is the case here. Parasite (B&W) is still bolstered by Joon-ho’s masterful filmmaking and there’s a beautiful, melancholic edge the performances have in black-and-white that they didn’t before; any opportunity to re-watch the film in a new light is a good one too, though sadly the lack of colour does take away from the sumptuous definition and grandeur of the original. It’s still a fantastic film, there’s no denying that, in any colour, but it feels like it loses some of its nuances in this new version.
Parasite (Black and White version) was reviewed at GFF 2020.
