Film Matters Magazine

“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom. / If this be error, and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

—Shakespeare, Sonnet 116, 1609

When I first watched Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee, 1995) with my mother—one of her favorite movies—at the age of ten, I did not leave with a renewed interest in the machinations of romance. Instead, I gained an unsubstantiated terror of Alan Rickman’s voice, a terrible understanding of British accents, and a desperate need to sprint across a moor in the pouring rain. During Hugh Grant’s final confession, I peeked over at my mother on the couch to see if she, too, was as taken aback by Emma Thompson’s hyperventilating, only to watch a tear slip down her cheek. Perplexed, I turned back to the screen, wondering how a trembling feather of a man could elicit such an emotional reaction both on and off screen. Ten years later, in the packed theater of the Emory Cinematheque, my sniffles joined the chorus of weeping watchers—safe to say, eventually, I understood.

“And when I get rich, I will buy this house. . . . Then all you have to do is walk up the stairs.”

—Parasite, dir. Bong-Joon Ho (2019)

In the sweltering depths of Yokohama, Japan, a young man peers up through the nooks and crannies of his lower-class neighborhood to fixate on a distant mansion. Cluttered stacks of books and chipped furniture cage him in, with fraying curtains fluttering beside his sweat-stained cheeks and a creaking ceiling barely brushing his head. That house, a haze-shrouded mirage in an urban wasteland, stands as a stark reminder of his destitution. The only thing separating him and the hill is a few miles—and a lifetime of money.