Leap Day

We were awakened early this morning to the sound of a new roof being constructed on a house next to the condos in Island Quay subdivision.  A team of four or five men were tearing off the old roof very quickly, it seemed, and carrying bundles of shingles up for the new one. These hard-working roofers must have started work before 7:00 a.m. - very impressive.

We had been able to complete our long runs on Friday this week, so today we had the morning free for Saturday morning yoga, which we have not been able to attend in a few weeks because of races, training, and travel.  It was a different kind of class with a different instructor, who played oldies music from the 60s and 70s - a "leap back" in time, she said, on this Leap Day.

After lunch, late in the afternoon, we drove to Beaufort for a special event we had been looking forward to, a showing at the Beaufort Picture Show, the series of films we have been watching in a tiny warehouse building.  It was a South Korean film called Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, that won many, many awards, including the best picture at the Academy Awards - the first foreign-language film ever to do so.  (I also learned that it had earned the mockery of our President, who opined that he would like to see the return of Hollywood classics like Gone with the Wind.)  "How did you ever get this film?" I asked one of the organizers as we arrived, the aroma of freshly-popped popcorn in the air in the tiny lobby.  "We've been on the waiting list for a long time!" she said.

With its English subtitles, it would never have been shown in most "normal" theaters here.  It told the strange black comedy story of a lower-class family who edged their way cunningly into the lives and household of  an upper class family.  The poor family lived down in a basement, and the film showed the young man (who scored a job tutoring the daughter of the rich family) climbing the long, long way up from the basement, through the squalid streets, higher and higher, until he reached the gated property, beautiful garden, and modernistic house designed by a famous architect which seemed to be located at the very summit of the city.

One of the ironic running jokes in the movie was that the basement was infested with stinkbugs - parasites - and was being treated by exterminators.  As Anthony Lane said in his review in The New Yorker, "Bong makes the eerie suggestion that the underclass might literally exist below the feet of the bourgeoisie. [He is] at pains to explore what lies beneath, in cellars and basements."  The underclass were themselves parasites of a kind.

With its many plot twists and turns and surprisingly violent ending, there was a lot to think about.  On the way out of the theater, I told the organizer, "You should have a place to go after films like this and have a cup of coffee and talk about it!"  We were still thinking about the movie as we crossed the Beaufort Inlet bridge; the sun was just going down - a beautiful sight!  When we walked in the condo, we could hear those roofers next door still hard at work, at nearly 7:00 p.m.  We went out to watch them; they were walking around confidently in the gathering darkness.  These were hard workers - not at all basement-dwellers, more like ballet dancers, up on the top of the world.