South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho – known for his 2013 dystopian thriller “Snowpiercer” – was the big winner at the Academy Awards this year with his latest film, “Parasite.” Like Joon-ho’s previous works, “Parasite” is largely about income inequality and societal divides between the rich and the poor; it portrays the clandestine rise of a poor, downtrodden family as they cunningly infiltrate a wealthy but witless household.
It reminded me of an older film from 1979; Hal Ashby’s “Being There,” an adaptation of a 1970 novel of the same name, starring Peter Sellers. Sellers played a jejune gardener who’d spent his entire life in recluse, tending the garden of an aging baron. When his employer passed away, the gardener was, for the first time in life, evicted and sent out into the wilderness of urban Washington D.C. with nothing but a suitcase of fine tailored suits. The film followed Sellers’ rapid rise from homeless illiterate naïf to advisor of the U.S. President (while still an illiterate naïf), as he unknowingly beguiled one wealthy tycoon after another.
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