We’ve watched nearly the entire filmography of director Park Chan-Wook so I was only too happy to add his latest, much talked about, feature to our list. This one is an erotic thriller with steamy sex scenes and was brilliantly adapted from an English novel, its original Victorian England setting transposed to Korea under Japanese rule.
A young maid enters the service of a Japanese heiress Hideko who lives in a large estate. However Sook-hee is actually a thief hired by a conman Count Fujiwara to help him seduce Hideko and claim her inheritance while she languishes in an asylum. Hideko lives under the guardianship of her uncle Kouzuki who plans to marry her himself. Sook-hee is initially intimidated by spookiness of the estate and Hideko’s story of how her aunt hung herself on a tree outside the house but the two quickly grow close and even become physically intimate. This causes Sook-hee to become a reluctant participant of the original plan as she resents Fujiwara’s seduction attempts. She does go through with the plan and the pair escape together from the estate. But after Hideko marries Fujiwara it is revealed that the two were working together all along and Sook-hee is the victim, yet this is only the first layer of intrigue.
Park has quite a reputation for exploring the darker side of human nature through his films but I believe that this is the first time his explorations are not only of such an explicitly erotic nature but involves a lesbian relationship to boot. There is a shocking amount of nudity and sex in here for a mainstream Korean film by a respectable director yet the wonder of it is that they aren’t even the sexiest scenes in it. It turns out that one of Kouzuki’s kinks is to collect erotic fiction and his entire library is filled with such texts and illustrations. He trains Hideko to read them aloud to a selected audience of male acquaintances. Hideko remains fully clothed throughout but the scene of her carefully articulating the highly graphic descriptions of sex acts while the male audience becomes visibly aroused and uncomfortable is delicious and fantastically erotic.
The multiple layers of betrayal is par for the course for Park and shocking as the eroticism is, The Handmaiden can’t match the emotional impact of his earlier and better known works. Still, the somewhat unpredictable nature of the plot plus the excellence of Park’s directing skills make this an engaging watch. Even if they don’t add up to a whole that is altogether exceptional, plenty of the individual scenes are so irresistible that you can’t tear your eyes away. The actresses are excellent and I was struck by how clever it is to adapt an English novel as a Korean film. All in all, this isn’t much more than entertainment, but it’s great entertainment.