Simone de Beauvoir argues that authentic freedom demands two interrelated conditions: an individual must engage in a concrete project, and that project must be recognized by other free subjects. Freedom cannot exist in a vacuum; it requires the horizontal solidarity of others to be realized, “by prolonging itself through the freedom of others.” But Beauvoir is equally clear that freedom is always situated — that “the situations which it discloses through its project toward itself do not appear as equivalents,” and that some situations make ethical conversion vastly harder than others. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) stage Beauvoir’s ethics across two such situations: mid-century colonialism and contemporary late capitalism. Pontecorvo’s lens builds, on screen, the collective subject required for liberation against a colonial power, where the oppressor is visible and the oppressed share a cultural and linguistic world from which their project can draw positive content. Bong’s camera reveals a situation in which neither condition holds — where the oppressor is systemic and atomized rather than embodied, and where the oppressed have no shared identity beyond a position on a ladder that everyone wants to climb. Read together, the films demonstrate that Beauvoir’s insistence on situated freedom is precisely what distinguishes ethically productive struggle from ethically catastrophic collapse. They leave open the question, for both sets of characters, of what agency Beauvoir’s framework still grants when their situation appears to compel them otherwise.
Beauvoir’s ethics rests on the premise that private will is insufficient for freedom; freedom must be externalized in the world and acknowledged by others. When the structural conditions for this recognition fail, individuals fall into a spectrum of ethical traps. Beauvoir catalogues several: the Sub-Man, who shrinks from the passion of existence into apathy and flight; the Serious Man, who “gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned,” treating wealth or nation or God as if they had value outside human freedom itself; the Nihilist; the Adventurer. These are not personality traits but failure modes a situation can produce. However, Beauvoir does not allow any situation to compel failure. Freedom remains, in her account, always available — the question is how dearly it must be conquered, and what content it can take. *Algiers *depicts a situation whose conditions for ethical conversion, though violent, are legible — a shared world, a visible enemy. Parasite depicts a situation in which those conditions have been so dispersed that the characters cannot find them, even where Beauvoir would insist they remain.
The Battle of Algiers dramatizes Beauvoirian freedom at the collective scale, and it does so completely, through form as much as content. The film is shot in degraded black-and-white, handheld, often through telephoto lenses that position the camera as a collective witness rather than attaching it to any single protagonist. Sound works the same way: the score is woven through with Algerian drumming, ululation, and crowd wailing — sounds that belong to no character but to the collectivity. When the FLN proclamation opens the film over views of the Casbah — “the time has come to break loose at long last from the bonds of misery in which one hundred and thirty years of colonial oppression has kept us chained” — the editing cuts directly between the dense, labyrinthine alleyways of the Algerian quarter and the wide, regular boulevards of the European city. The cut is the central spatial gesture of the film. It establishes a clear colonial binary, two worlds physically partitioned, with the checkpoint as the rigid but penetrable threshold between them. Crucially, this division does not generate a wish on the part of the Algerians to become European. The Algerian quarter has its own coherent world — language, religion, music, kinship structures — that the project of liberation seeks to defend and dignify, not transcend. The colonized do not want to emulate the colonizers; they want to expel them.
The three women preparing to plant their bombs make this dynamic explicit through a sustained sequence of passing. Hair dyed, veils removed, makeup applied, they cross the checkpoint into the French Quarter looking like the people whose space they intend to attack. The sequence is shot in near silence, intercut between the three women. The passing is tactical, not aspirational. The women perform European-ness to penetrate a space and detonate it. Pontecorvo’s framing insists they do not desire the identity they assume: each woman is shown putting on her costume and removing it in the same scene, the camera lingering on the prosthetic quality of their disguises. The colonial markers that the French treat as legal identification — hair, dress, gait, accent — are exposed as exactly what Beauvoir would call them: contingent significations that human freedom invests with meaning. The freedom on display already belongs to a project rather than to any one of the three women. They are, in Beauvoir’s terms, raising their original spontaneity to moral freedom by taking the project itself as an end.
What makes the film genuinely Beauvoirian is how unflinchingly it stages the cost of that project. The bombing sequence in the Milk Bar does not cut away from the operatives’ preparations to the explosions. It lingers, in long takes and close-ups, on the French civilians who will die: a child ordering an ice cream, an older man giving Hassiba his stool, young people laughing at the jukebox. The camera does the work of mutual recognition that the act of terror itself must foreclose. Beauvoir warned that “the exigencies of action force [men] to treat one another as instruments or obstacles,” and the film holds the audience inside exactly this tragedy. This mutual recognition survives even across enemy lines. When the captured FLN leader Ben M’Hidi is asked whether it is cowardly to use women’s baskets to carry explosives, he answers: “Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.” Colonel Mathieu — lit in bright, even tones contrasting with the shadows of the Casbah — tells journalists after staging M’Hidi’s murder as a suicide: “I had the opportunity to admire the moral strength, intelligence, and unwavering idealism demonstrated by Ben M’Hidi. […] I do not hesitate to pay homage to his memory.” Even the oppressor’s representative recognizes the freedom of the oppressed as freedom. The structural condition Beauvoir’s ethics requires survives — barely, through gritted teeth, across the line of murder — but it survives.
Parasite depicts a situation in which the spatial logic of the colonial city has been replaced by something stranger. There is no checkpoint, no rigid threshold, no visible enemy. The Park family is not a hostile occupier but the Kim family’s employer; the line between worlds is not a wall but a staircase the Kims are invited to climb. Where Pontecorvo cuts between two spaces, Bong shoots the descent between them as one continuous gesture. When the Kims are forced out of the mansion during a rainstorm, their flight becomes a long, uninterrupted shot of falling — down the hill, through a pedestrian tunnel, down endless flights of public stairs, into the rising waters of their flooded neighborhood. No cut interrupts the descent. The camera does not pause on other flood victims; horizontal solidarity is not offered. Even at the gym evacuation center, the Kims appear as the smallest figures in a high-angle wide shot, isolated within the mass. The contrast with Algiers is precise: where the colonial city is partitioned, the late-capitalist city is layered, and the threshold between layers is amorphous, total, and sealed by something that cannot be removed with a costume.
That something is the smell. Parasite is also a film about passing, but its passing fails. The Kims forge their way into the Park household with fake credentials, performed accents, manufactured references; they speak the right way, dress the right way, and execute their infiltration with the same tactical discipline the three Algerian women bring to theirs. But where the women’s costumes carry them through the checkpoint unchallenged, the Kims’ performance is repeatedly betrayed by a single uncontrollable marker. Mr. Park cannot place it at first — “Mr. Kim’s smell,” he calls it, a “subtle aroma” that “crosses the line.” The smell is what cannot be passed. It is the late-capitalist class marker that resists costume, because it is produced not by culture but by the physical conditions of poverty itself: the basement air, the shared damp, the fluorescent lit semi-subterranean life that no amount of borrowed clothing can wash off. What works as liberation in Algiers fails as exclusion in Parasite. The Algerian women can shed their costumes; the Kims cannot shed their smell.
The situation Bong depicts produces its own ethical tragedy, and it is one the colonial situation did not. The Kims do not encounter Yun the driver or Mun-Kwang the housekeeper as oppressors; they encounter them as obstacles. The infiltration of the Parks’ home is achieved not by attacking the oppressor’s space but by displacing fellow members of the precariat. When the Kim family intersects with Mun-Kwang and her bunker-dwelling husband Geun-Sae beneath the mansion, there is no recognition of a shared condition. Instead of uniting against the wealthy Parks, the two destitute households engage in a subterranean war over the scraps of the capitalist table. Mun-Kwang attempts to wield the language of solidarity, dropping to her knees and addressing Chung-Sook as “sis” in their shared poverty to beg for mercy. Chung-Sook’s response is to reject the bond outright: “I’m not your fucking sister, bitch. And I don’t need nobody’s help.” The line is the film’s compressed verdict on horizontal solidarity in this situation — the moment one of the two destitute women has temporary leverage over the other, kinship is renounced. This is the deepest contrast with Algiers: where the colonized recognize one another as sharers in a culture worth defending, the late-capitalist precariat have no positive identity to defend, only positions on a ladder that everyone wants to climb. Beauvoir’s mutual recognition has no content to attach itself to.
Whether this compels the failure that follows is a question Beauvoir’s framework will not let us close. The Kim family’s choices remain choices, even under the conditions Bong has so meticulously depicted, and the failure modes the characters fall into are the same ones Beauvoir catalogues for individuals in any situation. Mr. Kim’s evacuation-center speech to his son — “Do you want to know how you make a foolproof plan? Don’t plan at all. […] Doesn’t matter if you kill someone or commit fucking treason. Nothing fucking matters.” — is the Sub-Man verbatim. Beauvoir writes that the Sub-Man “is afraid of engaging himself in a project as he is afraid of being disengaged”; his acts are “never positive choices, only flights.” The climactic violence at the garden party that follows is not a Beauvoirian act of rebellion. Triggered by Mr. Park holding his nose at the smell of the dying Geun-Sae, Mr. Kim’s stabbing of his employer is a spontaneous eruption of flight and frustration; it has no political content, no collective addressee, no goal of liberation. It yields only corpses and his self-entombment in the basement. The film is careful, however, not to render Mr. Kim as merely a victim of his situation. The choice not to plan is named as a choice. Beauvoir would insist that other choices remained available to him, even here, and the film does not relieve him of that responsibility.
The Serious Man’s failure structures the film’s portrait of Geun-Sae and Ki-Woo. Beauvoir’s Serious Man is not simply someone who pursues wealth; he is someone who treats values as unconditioned — who acts as though wealth, or property, or success existed outside human freedom and could confer value on him by his accession to them. Geun-Sae has lived under the Park mansion for years; in his final living moments, he bangs Morse code on the kitchen light switches transmitting “Mr. Park, we love you so much,” shot from a low angle that exaggerates his smallness against the unseen master he adores from below. He has confused proximity to wealth with worth itself. But the ultimate Serious Man in Parasite is Ki-Woo, and the ultimate idol is the house. Ki-Woo’s concluding letter to his father does not vow to dismantle the system that destroyed his family. It vows to earn enough money to buy the same house. “Today I made a plan. A long-term plan. […] I’m going to make a lot of money. And when I get rich, I will buy this house.” The fantasy that follows — Mr. Kim emerging from the basement into sunlight, embraced by his family — is staged exactly as that, a fantasy, severed from reality. Bong cuts from the sunlit daydream back to Ki-Woo alone, admitting: “But I have a problem, Father — I have no idea how to get this letter to you.” The cut is the film’s verdict on the plan. Ki-Woo has not refused the system; he has rededicated himself to its highest value, projecting his redemption through the very condition — the house, the unconditioned good — whose pursuit produced the catastrophe. The Serious Man’s submission fills the space where Beauvoirian conversion would be, and the film knows this.
The two films, taken together, sharpen what Beauvoir means by situated freedom. Situated freedom is not freedom shrunk to fit bad conditions. It is the claim that a situation supplies the content any concrete project can take — and that different situations therefore make different projects available. The Algerian women have a project to defend a coherent world against an external occupier; the Kims have, available to them, only the project of climbing within a hierarchy whose top they have been taught to worship. The first situation produces revolutionary freedom with all its costs; the second produces the failure modes Beauvoir catalogued. This does not expose a limitation in Beauvoir’s theory. It demonstrates exactly what she insisted: that freedom is concrete, collective, and recognized, or it is not freedom. Beauvoir’s account requires both situations to be visible — the one in which freedom can find its content, and the one in which it cannot — and asks that the second not be mistaken for the first. The Battle of Algiers and Parasite hold them apart. The films name what is at stake when a situation produces the recognition Beauvoir requires, and what is at stake when it does not.