One manslaughter, one manslaughter
The new Korean film "Plastic Greenhouse", in some plot settings, is very reminiscent of Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite".
Kim Seo-hyung's heroine, Wen Jing, is a low-level housekeeper who takes care of an elderly couple with limited mobility, the latter of whom comes from a wealthy family, and the old gentleman Lee Tae-gang is also a highly respected writer.
In an accident, Wen Jing mistakenly killed the hostess, and in order to cover up the truth, she took her demented old mother to the Li family, pretending to be the hostess, intending to get away with it. At the same time, it also allowed the mother who had been in the nursing home for a long time to be "parasitic".
The two classes, which are also very different, also involve the acute social topic of "parasitism", but the human background and expression concept of "Plastic Greenhouse" and "Parasite" are completely different.
"Parasite" is about the wrestling between evil and evil. The Park family, who is in the upper class, and the Jin family, who are in the lower class, are not good at stubble. The Park family is polite on the surface, but in fact, they treat the Jin family as servants and ants, and they are disgusted with the "strange smell" on them.
The Jin family seems to be pitiful, but they are very good at camping, relying on cleverness, disguise and fraud, and obtain better living conditions.
In the final analysis, both of the Park and Kim families survive under the law of the jungle, but one is to grab benefits from the surface, and the other is to pick up the scraps in the dark. They are two incompatible factions, hostile to each other, and never sincere.
"Plastic Greenhouse" is different, the film has never revealed the snobbery of the Li family from beginning to end, on the contrary, Li Taijiang cares about Wen Jing very much, whether it is in terms of attitude or treatment, people can't find any fault. Wen Jing is the same, she does not covet or hate the old couple of the Li family, although the old lady often behaves inappropriately to Wen Jing because of Alzheimer's disease, she can always repay her grievances with virtue.
Wen Jing's accidental killing of the old lady was purely accidental. She did not call the police and surrendered so that her son could have a complete home after he was released from prison; Bringing her mother to the Li family for "parasitism" is not for greed, but for Wen Jing, as a "stupid person", the safest way to cover up the truth.
If you watch the whole movie, you will find that this is a silent killing between "good and good", they do not hate each other, but they slip into the quagmire of sin.
After Wen Jing killed the old lady, the film is attached to the black absurdity of the Coen brothers, and the plot is full of ups and downs, which catches people off guard.
While Wen Jing disposed of the old lady's body, Li Taejiang went home, but because he was blind, he could not see the body of his deceased wife on the floor. As a result, Li Taijiang hummed a little song leisurely, and cleverly missed it around Wen Jing and his deceased wife, and this scene was dispatched to reveal both a hint of thrilling and a hint of paradoxical absurdity.
Since then, in the plot, similar bizarre episodes have been staged repeatedly.
Li Taijiang, who was blind, became more and more suspicious of the "wife" next to him, especially when he touched the latter's hands and face, he became more convinced of his suspicions, and called an old friend to identify and confirm.
Old friends didn't take Li Taijiang's suspicions seriously. One is that it is too outrageous to suddenly suspect that the person next to the pillow is not his wife; The second is that Li Taijiang also suffers from Alzheimer's disease, and it is also the norm to be inaccurate in recognizing people.
Under this premise, Wen Jing escaped again. But can she always be lucky, relying on the replacement of her old mother, to survive until Li Taijiang dies?
The ending was unexpected again, Li Taejiang suddenly came to his wife's room, choked the sleeping "wife" by the throat, and finally strangled him to death, and he himself hanged himself in the bathroom.
The sudden double death was already explained in Michael Haneke's masterpiece "Love".
The old writer could not take care of his deceased wife, nor could he face the twilight years of gradual dementia, so in order to prevent the dignity of his life from collapsing, he decided to die with his wife.
Li Taijiang didn't expect that his wife had already died in the hands of Wen Jing; What Wen Jing didn't expect was that the old mother became the "scapegoat" of the hostess.
The gears of death did not stop, and Wen Jing's longing son was released from prison early, but the latter and a group of teenagers came to the plastic shed where they used to live, drinking and talking nonsense. What they didn't know was that there was also a corpse hidden in the cabinet in the greenhouse, and this corpse was Li Taijiang's deceased wife.
Wen Jing suddenly came to the greenhouse, intending to destroy the corpse. And Wen Jing's son and his friends, in order to hide from Wen Jing, hid.
After the gasoline was spilled, the greenhouse quickly ignited. Wen Jing finally breathed a sigh of relief, she thought that after destroying the evidence of the crime, she would usher in a new life, but what she didn't know was that her son was hiding inside.
The title of the film "plastic greenhouse" is very meaningful. On the surface, it points to the plastic greenhouse in the wasteland where Wen Jing settled, but its deeper meaning is a mixture of Wen Jing's good and evil, her tragedy and the death she created.
In the first scene of the feature film, it is a plastic greenhouse in the twilight, like a huge coffin, which makes people breathless. The crows flew through the air, adding to the aura of death, and the gloomy hue of the sky made it difficult to distinguish between the morning light symbolizing hope and the dark night representing despair.
In this plastic greenhouse, Wen Jing accepted Chunnan, a girl with the same bad fate, and temporarily freed her from the harm of her sexual predator; But it was also here that Wen Jing tore open Chunnan's past scars and sprinkled salt on his wounds. Not to mention, Wen Jing hid and destroyed corpses in this greenhouse.
If we say that Li Cangdong's "Burning", through the act of the rich "burning the barn", shows the tragedy and anger at the bottom, and the arrogance and indifference at the top. Then, in "Plastic Greenhouse", "burning the barn" is replaced with another symbolic meaning: the people in the film, driven by the subconscious, take revenge on the whole society.
The reason why it is subconscious, as mentioned above, we have never seen Wen Jing's humble anger, nor have we glimpsed Li Taijiang's superiority, they are harmonious, and the harmony is unbelievable.
The most interesting thing about "Plastic Greenhouse" is this. It constantly uses editing techniques to cover up part of the truth and hide the true emotions of several characters, making us think about what caused this series of tragedies, and we can only watch the gears of their fate begin to turn, sliding step by step into the abyss.
This can't help but remind people of the Korean film "The Next So-hee" that caused heated discussions in the first half of the year. In this movie, how did So-hee, who is lively and optimistic by nature, commit suicide step by step? has become a question that criminal policeman Wu Youzhen is constantly looking for in the second half of the film.
From graduation school to employment company, from the original family to the social environment, Oh Youzhen found that it was not a certain person who "killed" So-hee, but the entire Korean society.
In "Plastic Greenhouse", Chunnan, a mentally handicapped girl, was abandoned by her mother since she was a child, and the inaction of welfare institutions made her only morbidly dependent on sexual assault repeat offenders; Li Taijiang, a writer in the upper echelon, gave up his desire to live and died a tragic death under the torture of illness; The heroine is quiet, obviously simple and kind, but in the end she becomes a murderer and destroys her body.
These characters in the film obviously just yearn for a trace of warmth and freedom, but in the rigid system, they are moving towards the distortion of human nature.
As the debut film of rookie director Lee So-hee, this film did not cause much repercussions in South Korea, and it only had a score of 7.1 on Douban, with few viewers.
But whether it is its degree of completion or the expression of the theme, it is calm and powerful, and quite disciplined. With the general downturn in Korean films this year, it is a niche masterpiece that should not be missed.
Flowers have no feast