A BRAZILIAN TAKE ON "PARASITE"
Typology: set design
Year: 2021
Project area: 300 m²
Year: 2021
Project area: 300 m²
* study project for the course “Stage Design: The Place of the Scene”.
The proposed exercise for the final project of this course was to take the narrative of a given movie – in this case, Parasite by Bong Joon-ho, and design the set for a play based on that narrative. Parasite is a movie about an extremely poor family from South Korea that infiltrates into the mansion of a millionaire family by lying and manipulating them into hiring all the family for different jobs, without knowing they are related. There are many surprises and plot twists throughout the movie, but it tells a very clear story regarding social inequality and the abyss there is between the rich and the poor who coexist in the same city.
With this analysis, we realized this tale could easily be set in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a city vastly scarred by social disparities, where there are favelas (slums) in every neighborhood, interlaced with luxurious apartment complexes.
For that adaptation to feel more realistic, a few major changes to the scenery would have to be done. The movie depicts the poor family living in a half-basement apartment and the rich family in a mansion on the top of a hill. But in Rio, a big part of the poor population lives in favelas, which occupy mainly the city’s mountains, while the rich live in expensive apartments by the sea. Therefore, the scene where there is a flooding of the half-basement apartment would translate to a landslide in the favela. Another change we made was on the access to the secret basement of the mansion – in the movie, it’s via the pantry, while in our set we added something very characteristic of the Brazilian homes: the "quartinho de empregada" (maid’s bedroom), a room made for the maids to sleep in the house where they worked, something even more symbolic of our social differences.
The set is a metallic structure built over a two by two meters grid, symbolizing the urban mesh and also creating a pattern for the construction. The structure holds platforms on different heights, representing the top of the building and, at some points, the interior of the houses. The poor family’s house is a hanging structure, physically creating the lack of stability that permeated those people’s lives. Across the favela area of the stage, there are a couple of other structures like this.
The idea o oppression is double-sided and brought in three ways. First one in through scale – the poor house at the favela is so small the four people of the family can barely fit in there together and with a ceiling so low that they can’t stand up completely, whereas the rich house is big and spacious, with a very high ceiling. The second one is the access to the houses – to access the top of the favela the actors have to either climb the metallic structure or the platforms. Finally, the third one is one more thing that is very particular of Rio de Janeiro: scared of the violence of the city, the rich hide behind high walls in their own personal prisons, so the rich house is surrounded by tall fences while the poor house is all open.
By the final scene, after the landslide and the killing, the curtains no longer cover up the reality of the rich people. After the son of the poor family discovers his missing father is now secretly living in the bunker, he writes him a letter about how he is going to get rich, buy the mansion and reunite with his father. Just like a child seeking out his dad, he releases a swing from the structure and swings while he reads the letter.
