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  • that's a gun, bang jun ho is a filmmaker obsessed with rhythm.

  • You can sense it in all of his films, but in his latest parasite, he outdoes himself.

  • The tempo is perfectly calibrated as a viewer.

  • It almost feels like you're surfing the story the way the editing and camera work, Sound design and music carries you from moment to moment.

  • I think bong knows that getting the pacing exactly right is the only way he can get his bold tonal shifts to work.

  • The result of such attention to rhythm is a totally immersive viewing experience.

  • The cadence of the whole movie is tightly controlled, but There's a montage about 40 minutes in that distills his mastery into a perfect diamond of a sequence, 60 shots, almost exactly five minutes, definitely my favorite five minutes of the year.

  • And I think it's worth taking a closer look at because it's really a thing of beauty.

  • First, the setup, the montage comes at the end of act one of parasite after a poor family have almost successfully duped a rich family into hiring them all for service jobs.

  • The son becomes a tutor, the daughter becomes an art teacher, the father a driver, and now they're attempting to bring the mother in as a housekeeper.

  • Problem is that the existing housekeeper is well established and well liked by the rich family.

  • So the poor family hatches a plan to remove her from the picture.

  • It's a great idea to enact this plan in Montage because we've already seen three successful cons at this point, the tempo slowly building in each with a montage the cutting will get even faster and bond can bring the entire act to a crescendo.

  • Also, as the poor families plans get more sophisticated, it's only right that the filmmaking does as well.

  • A montage like this is going to test your ability to convey a lot of information across a limited number of shots.

  • In this case 60.

  • Let's take a look at the first few.

  • The first thing I notice is how balletic everything is helped along by a classical piece from Handel's rosalinda Opera.

  • The pacing is mesmeric Bang achieves this by selectively using both slow motion and linear camera moves.

  • Every shot offers a piece of information.

  • Several foreshadow later moments in the montage and this referencing back and forth as well as the camera moves and the music all contribute to making the sequence into an organism all its own.

  • A montage is a sequence that manipulates time.

  • Look how many shots it takes to get from idea to execution.

  • Bong gets from the moment the sun hears about the housekeepers.

  • Allergy to the moment he poisons her in eight economical shots.

  • That's conciseness worthy of Hitchcock who actually snuck into this montage.

  • A few shots back.

  • The poor father is deceiving the rich mother.

  • So Bang shows him literally taking her for a ride.

  • He sets the pace and she follows it.

  • But there's actually another level of control here because the words he says were written by his son who designed this duplicitous little play at this point.

  • It's probably a good idea to bring up bong's editor Jin mo yang who obviously had a major role in shaping this sequence and the whole film.

  • Now Bang does a lot of the editing himself by extensively story boarding.

  • But any editor will tell you that the rhythm of a scene comes down to minute adjustments and sometimes you have to get creative.

  • If you look at this shot for example, frame by frame, you can see something strange right here in the middle of this pan yang stitched together two different shots because neither individually had the perfect pacing from both actors.

  • So he Frankenstein did to get the right tempo.

  • Yang also had a big part in finessing this section of the montage which originally had much more repetition of the lines, yang inter cut the locations to give the tempo more bounce and as a result it feels like a single conversation which actually reinforces the conversation.

  • This montage is already having with itself, a conversation that is about to pay off.

  • Mm hmm.

  • Mhm mm hmm.

  • No, this montage is a testament to Bang Juninho's control of his craft, but it's also about control.

  • It comes at the moment in the story when the poor families cunning, their ability to control things has reached its pinnacle.

  • Their plan was as perfect as the sequence and it went off just as smoothly.

  • But as we and the family quickly discover even the most airtight plans are vulnerable to events.

  • Success often contains the seeds of a later downfall, especially when it was achieved by means of cruelty.

  • In Act two, the bottom falls out narratively and literally and this montage is cast in a new light.

  • The plan was not as perfect as it seemed, which of course makes the montage even more so hey everybody, happy holidays, happy new year, Happy decade.

  • Thank you so much for watching.

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that's a gun, bang jun ho is a filmmaker obsessed with rhythm.

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