As far as I could tell in the movie the rich people were depicted as decent parents if not a bit naive, while the poor family were backstabbing assholes who betrayed their fellow workers (the housekeeper and her husband) because of sheer malice. Not once does the film hint at the underlying economical system as the reason why the rich are rich and the poor are poor.
If you are a socialist, you will (correctly) identify capitalism as the reason for the misery of the poor people in the film, and the rich as part of the bourgeoisie who exploit them. But that isn’t any different than analysing an IRL crime through that lens, the film didn’t help you reach that conclusion, it just presented a scenario.
A chud could easily see the rich family as the honest entrepreneurs and the poor family as poor because of the negative behaviors they exhibited, and there is nothing in the film that would dispute that interpretation.
With the poor family getting punished for their deception, and the son resolving to make money to save his father at the end (presumably through more “honest” means), it even displays the “pull yourself by the bootstraps” belief.
The best case interpretation of the film I can make is that “the rich people should be more conscious of the poor’s struggles, and the poors should stay in their place or risk losing everything” which is pretty reactionary and not the class conscious film many people described it as. I guess you could see the ending as punishment for the class betrayal but I think that’s a stretch.
Am I overzealous in policing the politics of the media I consume to the point of misinterpreting things or finding an even vaguely leftist film that hard?
That’s the whole point of the film. Socialism is not about moralism, nor is it about the people you like.
The film even went as far as overtly stating that the rich people can afford to appear “nice” and “kind” precisely because they can materially afford to do so, while the poor have to survive by any means necessary, even if it means cheating, stealing and robbing one another. These behaviors reflect their respective socio-economic upbringings that further divide the classes on a cultural level (“look at the dirty, rude poor people, unlike us affluent, upper middle class people who are cultured and civilized”).
Exploitation by the bourgeois class is an integral component baked into the capitalist system itself, and the class interests of the poor and the rich are fundamentally opposed to one another. It doesn’t matter whether the rich or the poor are decent people, what matters is that exploitation leads to inequality which in turn sustains the capitalist mode of production itself.
Systemic exploitation continues to happen even if all the rich people are decent and kind people who genuinely love their employees and servants and want to give them better pay/benefits. This is what socialism is trying to end.
The film literally depicts the final sequence as an ultimately futile endeavor and nothing more than a dream that functions to sustain the son’s motivation to perpetuate his own role as a labor who generates surplus value for the system.
Is it really not clear enough from the film’s exposition? Do they really need to spell it all out? And here I thought the part where one of the protagonists overtly said that “rich people can afford to be nice, while we can’t” is already a bit too on the nose.
I bet you it isn’t as clear as it should be, and having more parts such as this
would probably make for less interesting art but relay the themes better which is pretty important imo