Review: The Handmaiden
The Handmaiden, the latest from South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook, certainly doesn't skimp on the erotic, macabre and violent extremities that have been part and parcel of his repertoire from Old Boy to his underrated English-language feature Stoker. Transplanting Sarah Waters' novel Fingersmith from Victorian England to 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule, Park fashions a sumptuous hotbed of cruel intentions, fatalistic perversions, tangled duplicities, and a steamy lesbian romance.
Retaining the novel's triptych structure, The Handmaiden begins from the point of view of Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), an orphan born into a den of thieves who has been enlisted by a con man posing as a Count (Han Jung-woo) to ingratiate herself with Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), cloistered niece of the wealthy Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong). The plan is for Sook-hee to convince her mistress to marry the Count so that he can get her away from her pervy uncle and, by doing so, get his hands on her fortune once he commits her to a mental asylum.
Of course, the grift isn't quite as straightforward as planned. For one thing, matters are complicated by the romantic feelings that develop between Sook-Hee and Lady Hideko. For another, their prey may have designs of her own as Park reveals when the film shifts to Lady Hideko's perspective. The noblewoman has been a prisoner for most of her life, groomed from a young age by her lascivious uncle to perform readings of his antique erotica collection for a select audience of aristocratic men. Lady Hideko is haunted by memories of her aunt, who also performed the readings, went mad, and hung herself from a cherry tree. Lady Hideko has thought of escaping her uncle's clutches, but his threat of taking her to "the basement" chills her into inaction.
No wonder, for Park reveals the basement to be a subterranean chamber of horrors. Male and female genitalia float in jars of formaldehyde, a large octopus in a tank (a nice callback to Old Boy's most famous scene), and book-cutting tools to be used as implements of torture are merely a few of the basement's contents. Park obviously revels in these grotesqueries as well as the pantingly prurient readings of Kouzuki's aberrant erotica. One performance even culminates in Lady Hideko straddling a wooden mannequin and being raised from the rafters, dangling like a sex doll for her increasingly aroused audience. This tableau would also seem to suggest that Lady Hideko is bound for the same fate as her aunt, but when Park shows Lady Hideko hanging from that same cherry tree, the scene is unexpectedly funny and romantic.
The unexpected is the baseline for this elegant, intriguing and just plain bonkers effort from Park. The Handmaiden is a feminist revenge tale at heart, but it's deeply moored in shrewd observations about class, gender and sexuality. Though both Sook-hee and Lady Hideko are hampered by their circumstances, they are very much the mistresses of their own destinies. Both actresses skillfully navigate the subtle re-calibrations required by the tricky narrative structure. Their sex scenes leave little to the imagination (at a certain point, one wonders if Park was trying to one up Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Colour), but never feel unsavoury or exploitative. A scene in a bathtub involving a lollipop and a tooth file is memorable for both its outrageousness and stirring eroticism.
Chung Chung-hoon's exquisite cinematography lingers on every detail of Ryu Seong-hee's superlative production design. Dark Gothic interiors blend harmoniously with the airy symmetry of Japanese sets, and one's eyes are satiated with a never-ending feast of visual paraphernalia from the drawers upon drawers of gloves to the textures and fabrics of the furnishings to the swirls of calligraphy that burrow into the senses.
The Handmaiden
Directed by: Park Chan-wook
Written by: Park Chan-wook, Chung Seo-Kyung; based on the novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Starring: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Han Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong
