Here are four films that bring into focus the struggles of the world's have-nots. (And don't read this before you watch the movies, unless you prefer to avoid surprises...)

1.
Parasite
2019, Bong Joon-ho

With its potent mixture of genres -- black humour, social satire, suspense, even horror -- this is a highly original movie, and the bleakest of the quartet.

It directs its gaze towards the gulf between the rich and the poor. The poor are literally buried -- in semi-basements where they're peed on by drunken passers-by, and subjected to fountains of excrement after a flood strikes; or in bunkers where they never see the light of day. The rich, surrounded by luxury and attended by servants, live in elegant, airy mansions, ringed by lawns.


All the photos were taken in 2015, in the part of Seoul that we're more used to seeing...

The movie's premise is that social mobility is impossible. But Ki-woo, the son in the four-member Kim family whose fortunes we follow, will not accept this. It is his "plan" to rescue his family that drives the plot.

Dad (Ki-taek), on the other hand, has given up planning. With multiple business failures behind him, he has accepted the lack of control that poverty brings, and tasked by his wife (Chung-sook) to come up with a way forward for the family, he remains mute. How can you plan, after all, when you live from hand to mouth? Ki-woo and his sister (Ki-jung, aka Jessica) have failed their university entrance exams (cutting off another route for upward mobility), and when we meet them, they're struggling to tap into free internet, without which they're even more trapped.

Ki-woo, however, is given the opportunity to work as an English tutor for the Park family (successful father, anxious mother, lovelorn daughter, and troubled son). His acceptance requires Ki-jung to exercise her excellent photo-shop skills to produce the academic qualification that he doesn't have. But he's in. Where he goes wrong is in getting the rest of his family employed by the Parks too, a move that involves not only further bouts of forgery but also nasty subterfuges to get rid of the previous employees -- the driver and housekeeper -- who are standing in their way.

There is no working-class solidarity in evidence here. It's dog eat dog. As Richard Brody notes, "Where the nineteenth-century robber baron Jay Gould infamously said, 'I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,' Bong suggests, in his whiplash-sardonic satire, that by hiring only one half of the working class, the rich are already in effect killing the other half -- that, in the very search for work, the working class can be relied on to kill each other unbidden."

Despite their ruthlessness, you can't help liking the Kims; you want them to succeed. The rich family, on the other hand, though not tyrants, are irritating. Their sheltered existence -- to them the poor, even when clean, smell different... -- has made the mother naive and gullible, the father dismissive and arrogant.



There's a half-way turning-point, predictably, where everything the Kims have built comes crashing down. They come into contact with another pair of interlopers (the husband of the former housekeeper has been existing in the walled-off cellar for years), and the two rival units become locked in internecine conflict. The climax is a bloodbath. Several characters are killed; Ki-woo suffers a brain injury; and Ki-taek (who has killed Mr Park) is forced to take refuge in the same cellar that his late rival formerly occupied.

Ki-woo, however, has even now not given up hope. We watch a sequence where he lays out his latest plan: To work hard, buy the house where his father is effectively imprisoned, and bring the family back together... This very detailed analysis quotes the film-maker: "You know and I know -- we all know that this kid isn't going to be able to buy that house. I just felt that frankness was right for the film, even though it's sad." It's as though he's saying that to believe in the possibility of upward social mobility you need to have had a brain injury...

So, who, actually, is the parasite? The people who fraudulently insinuate themselves into the house of the rich? Or the people who live off the sweat and conflict of the poor?



2.
Two Days, One Night (Deux jours, une nuit -- amazingly...)
2014, Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne

This low-key movie is very different from Parasite, but also foregrounds the theme of working-class solidarity.

A young woman, Sandra, has been away from her work (in a solar-panel manufacturing company in Seraing, Belgium) because of illness (some kind of depression). When she is due to return, she is told that her boss has found he can do without her, and has presented the workforce with a very personal choice: her job, or their EUR 1,000 bonus. A supervisor has (allegedly) influenced the vote by adding some threatening details of his own invention, so she is allowed to organize a re-run of the ballot, and has until Monday to persuade her colleagues to vote for her to stay.

I don't know how legal that kind of thing would be. But it makes for a moving scenario. Sandra is unassuming, uncomplaining, understanding. Her husband is supportive. They have nice kids, and a nice, if simple, home. They live comfortably enough (we're nowhere near the situation of the Parasite protagonists), but they need her wages to get by. So, on the other hand, do all her colleagues...



Sandra definitely engages our sympathy. We can't help but care as we follow her through her discouragements and triumphs; we shudder at her frequent recourse to anti-depressants, which nonetheless fail to prevent a cry-for-help suicide attempt; we wince as the decision to support her or not causes friction within other families; we groan when she loses the new vote; we cheer when she turns down an offer that would save her job, but shaft someone else later; and we breathe a sigh of relief that it looks as though she'll be OK -- she's lost her job here, but she'll pick up the cudgels and soldier on, buoyed by the kindness of others and the sense that she has done the right thing.

The whole movie functions as a parable of how the world works. Effectively, we all vote all the time -- by not staging an out-and-out revolution -- for other people to be out of work, and poor, so that we can have our bonuses...

Interesting, too, that it's the immigrants, the poorest and most vulnerable, who are portrayed as the kindest...

This socialist critique criticizes the film-makers for focusing on agency rather than structure: They "claustrophobically train their camera (literally) on the immediate and particular, in the process setting aside the big, historic problems that confront the population... By default, the focus then becomes the individual moral response of this or that worker to the difficult conditions. By a process of intellectual sleight of hand, of which the film-makers may not be entirely conscious themselves, the population turns out to be responsible for its own circumstances."

But that's the film's point, surely? In a poorly regulated work environment, individuals, blown hither and thither by the whims of the market, ARE left to shoulder their own burdens, and fight for their own positions...

This comment is worth pondering, though: "The abiding irony of the Dardennes' situation is that their crusading, working-class stories are predominantly consumed by a bourgeois elite..." It's true, no? How many of us watch the movie, and actually DO something?



I've mentioned before how much I appreciate the "dossiers pedagogiques" that so often accompany francophone movies. This one suggests lots of useful avenues for teachers to explore when using the movie in class, among them one at which I couldn't help but smile: "Throughout the film, the characters eat mainly pizzas, tarts, sodas, and ice creams... Make the connection between a rather underprivileged environment (even if here everything is relative) and junk food. (Take the opportunity to remind students that five fruits and vegetables a day is actually pretty good for your health.)"



3.
The Teacher (the French title, Les grands esprits -- Great Minds -- would surely have made a better title than the anodyne English replacement...)
2017, Olivier Ayache-Vidal

Another movie about the economic and psychological factors that affect the possibility of social mobility...

Francois Foucault (the choice of names is interesting given the famed Michel Foucault's interest in the connections between knowledge and power...) teaches at the prestigious Henri IV secondary school in Paris.

He's not a particularly sympathetic teacher. He gets no push-back from his students, and therefore gives free rein to his sarcasm and sense of superiority.

A bit of bravado, coupled with some sleight of hand on the part of the education ministry, results in his temporary transfer to a school in "an education priority zone". This is code for one of the soulless housing estates of the Parisian outskirts. (In French it's the "banlieue", a word that's always really difficult to translate. Literally, it's "suburb", but the green-and-leafy connotations of the English word have little in common with the gritty realities conjured up by the French expression.)



Francois struggles, predictably, with these young people. They've been conditioned by circumstances to be tough, and there's little room for niceties such as respect and sweet language.

But to his credit, Francois does not give up. Bit by bit, he tries to understand, to adapt, to connect what he knows to the experience of the students -- in short, he sides with those members of staff who are still determined to make a difference.

In doing so, he distinguishes himself from the colleagues who really have given up, and have no real interest in the young people's education any more. Not that I'm necessarily blaming them. Education is a hard metier. They've probably tried. And, meeting with little success, they've probably burned out. It's hard to keep slogging along with little obvious reward. But there's clearly a real vicious circle at work here. Kids who are expected to fail will fail... If no-one helps them to open different doors, they are highly likely to just fall into the old traps of anti-social behaviour, delinquency, and further cycles of poverty.

There are rewards for Francois, too. Over the course of the film, the rigid, bitter, arrogant person we saw at the beginning slowly becomes someone more uncertain and also more generous.

The film-maker spent two years closely observing what went on in a real school, and read extensively about pedagogical issues. Only the lead actors are professionals. The others are real pupils, drawn from among those he sat in class with. The backdrop is the school itself.

Ayache-Vidal found the environment "turbulent but engaging". He was upset, though, by the way disciplinary councils effectively abused their power to permanently exclude students who didn't merit that punishment. At the time the movie was made, there were apparently 17,000 permanent exclusions in France every year, ie, 100 students per class day... That's an awful lot of interrupted education...

This is a film that offers plenty of reality, but also a modicum of hope. Francois has at least planted some seeds, made some inroads... Whether he will continue to apply his new pedagogical insights, once he's back in his old place of privilege, we are not permitted to know...

When you've finished watching, the age-old questions still reverberate: How do you teach? How do you inspire students to want to learn? Where is the line between making knowledge accessible, and dumbing down? How do you ensure that education offers a way out and a way up, rather than a spiral down?



4.
Insecure (again, this title misses the nuances of the French original, Qui vive, which literally means "who lives", but whose hyphenated form, qui-vive, means to be "on the alert")
2014, Marianne Tardieu

We're in the banlieue again for this movie, albeit in its Breton rather than Parisian manifestation.

The central character, Cherif, works a dull job as a security guard. He's outwitted by cheating customers, and harassed by the local employed youth. He doesn't want to be in this job or in this place (where it is apparently always windy...) He wants to be a nurse. Somewhere else.

And things are looking good. He has failed the nursing entrance exam more than once already, but this time he passes the written test, and is given the opportunity to do the oral. He starts up a relationship with a nice young teacher from the school where he used to work as an assistant. She is impressed by how much the kids liked him, and still talk about him.

So what can go wrong? Well, if all these films have one message, it's that life without a certain financial cushion is fragile. Something can always go wrong. And the catalyst here is Cherif's all-too-short fuse with regard to those pesky kids, whose inane taunts -- and this can happen, right? -- somehow get right under his insecure skin.



His attempts to sort this situation involve him in a dodgy deal, and -- indirectly -- in the death of one of the youths. For a while, his life crumbles.

But he does eventually get to be a trainee nurse, somewhere else... Despite the bad oral, he has obviously been accepted onto a course, and we see him easily mastering the procedures they're teaching him.

And, in the police reconstruction of the fatal incident, he gets the other kid off the hook. By telling an untruth, but hey...

So we end with two people getting another chance. Whether they will use it or blow it remains to be seen, but at least there's a glimmer of hope. And in answer to that central question -- "Can we ward off social inevitability?" -- the movie "offers an intelligently ambiguous answer".