Maiden Korea
The Handmaiden / directed by Chan-wook Park
The Handmaiden is a film constructed with as much cunning as the plots hatched by its devious and desperate inhabitants. It’s a genre-mashing bodice-ripper, except that in its playful and perverse universe, the camera lingers as often over the donning of bodices as their undoing - and they are never actually ripped, only ever sensually undone.
Set in 1920’s or 1930’s Korea, when the country was occupied by Japan, the tale opens with young pickpocket Sook-Hee (Tae-ri Kim) sent to wait as handmaiden to a wealthy Japanese woman named Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim), who lives in seclusion as the ward of her Korean uncle (Jin-woong Jo). Sook-hee is one-half of a conspiracy hatched by an accomplice, who has taken the pseudonym Count Fujiwara (Jung-woo Ha) in an effort to seduce and marry Hideko out from under her uncle’s nose; the plan is to gain control of her inheritance, and them commit her to a madhouse to seal the deal. Sook-Hee, street smart and looking forward to her cut of the loot - she dreams of using the money to escape from Korea - smartly plays the ingenue to gain Hideko’s trust and help persuade her to marry Fujiwara. But from the start you get that she’s in fact overwhelmed by Hideko’s beauty and vulnerability, not just playing a part. In one of the film’s many scenes of previously unfilmed erotic tension, she delicately files down a sharpened tooth of her mistress, thimbled finger gently moving in Hideko’s mouth as the lady lounges naked and vulnerable in a hot bath. Their increasingly intense connection runs smack into her real purpose for being there; Fujiwara forcefully reminds her of their end game, and Sook-Hee seems to return to the master plan - but a reversal at the end of the first act shows that while Sook-Hee has been running a game on Hideko, it seems that Hideko has also been running a game on her.
From there, the movie tells the tale from Hideko’s point of view, starting fifteen years in the past. I found the switch deeply thrilling, and you can only imagine the pleasure to be had when yet a third switch occurs later in the film. I’d like to think that such reactions are totally apt for The Handmaiden, which, among other things, is an exploration of pleasure, both fleshly and visual. As layered as one of Hideko’s corseted outfits, The Handmaiden thrills with its dynamic succession of fresh perspectives; scenes are revisited for new information, while lines repeated verbatim in ways that gain increased significance.
This is a sharply-plotted and sensual journey, in which small details carry emotional weight and narrative clues, from a pair of shoes that Lady Hideko gives to Sook-Hee, to a coiled rope that Sook-Hee extracts from a hat box while playing dress-up with her mistress’ clothes. Beyond this, it’s also a deeply erotic film that's consciously interested in the idea of eroticism, to the point that it seems to contain within itself something of a history of the subject, from the world of print to the erotic in film, with The Handmaiden itself being Exhibit A for the latter. Sook-Hee’s uncle, Kouzuki, is a connoisseur of erotic prints and literature; he’s also a deeply evil man, and has raised Hideko to read these stories to rich men to entice them to buy forgeries of the books (he’s too much of a collector to part with the originals). Tongue eerily blackened by whetting his writing implement, and with marriage designs on his own niece, he’s a modern take on the moustache-twirling villain; in a detail both creepy and funny, a servant carries him when he moves from one building to another on his estate, an evocation of his casual sadism and addiction to pornography (he’s able to keep reading during these brief trips, wasting nary a precious minute).
Hideko and Sook-Hee’s mutual attraction leads to sex scenes that are deeply sensual and emotionally resonant - sex is how they get to really know each other, and know how each feels about the other, and their coupling also play against the tales of dominance and submission that Kouzuki collects by the hundreds. Among other things, The Handmaiden ends up being an tale of female empowerment and redemption.
Although it’s replete with sadism and exploitation, the special sauce that makes The Handmaiden really work - apart from its gorgeous but never overdone cinematography, deeply skillful script, and playfulness - is a layering of humor, often dark, and an affection for its characters, whether they be the good, the bad, or the ugly. It’s a tale that realizes it's overwrought, acknowledges it, and sucks you into it anyway. Director Chan-wook Park is best know for his Vengeance trilogy, including the hit Oldboy; while there are flashes of the gruesomeness that’s piled on thick in those films, what it shares with them most is a striking intimacy with people in extreme situations, and an interest in redemption and karmic balance. In more than one way, The Handmaiden makes an intriguing twin to Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, which also thrives off repetition, sadism, mystery, and power plays. If you’re playing catch-up with the best films of 2016, you could do worse than treating yourself to a double feature of these two.