The Handmaiden
Studio: Magnolia Pictures
Directed by Park Chan-wook
Oct 21, 2016
Web Exclusive
Lady Hideko is a sheltered young heiress living under the watchful eye of her cruel uncle on a palatial estate in 1930s Korea. Little does she know that her beloved suitor, Count Fujiwara, and her new handmaiden, Sook-he, are actually con artists looking to swindle her out of her fortune. Complications arise when Sook-he and Hideko grow closer than either intended.
Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy – which includes his breakout hit, Oldboy – is generally credited with letting Western audiences know that South Koreans excel at revenge cinema. In 2013, he made his English language debut with Stoker, a chilly, Gothic riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. His follow up, The Handmaiden, sees him transporting Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith from Victorian England to his homeland during its occupation by the Japanese during the 1930s. This time his touchstone of choice is Rebecca, Hitchcock’s foray into lesbian Gothic psychodrama that earned him his only Best Picture Oscar in 1940. Had the Master of Suspense survived until the 21st century, it’s not difficult to imagine him making something like The Handmaiden, although Park’s film is so lurid, lush, and perverse it would have made even Hitch himself blush.
Although The Handmaiden could easily rest on its violent, sexy laurels, Park and what must have been an army of set decorators, prop masters and costumers have created a dense, fully-realized world, one that could easily be the setting of a ten-hour miniseries rather than a two-and-a-half-hour movie, and Park fills every frame of his roving camera with its depth and detail. Equally dense is the narrative, featuring hidden identities, multiple twists, nested flashbacks and color-coded subtitles – white for Korean, yellow for Japanese. The film strains slightly under the weight of the various plot reversals in the back half, but the actors keep the characters engaging and believable despite the insanity happening around them. As the thief-turned-servant protagonist, actress Kim Tai-re takes a part that is straight out of a film noir – complete with cynical voiceover – and infuses it with a goofy enthusiasm that is both charming and unexpected. The entire film pivots on her excellent chemistry with Kim Min-hee, who plays Lady Hideko. Even when The Handmaiden reaches its most explicit, potentially exploitative heights, their relationship still feels complex and genuine, so much so that it makes a film that features torture, betrayal and perversion seem, at times, downright sweet.
Author rating: 8/10
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