The Handmaiden (3/5 Stars)

I feel like my view of Korean cinema may be prejudiced by the narrow amount of movies I have seen from that region, three quarters of which have been by one director, Park Chan-Wook, who besides being one of the world’s greatest living directors also happens to be one of the most interested in exploring man’s capacity for cruelty. Is Korea a crueler place than the average? It seems like it though my sample size is stupidly small.

The main reason I saw "The Handmaiden" is because Park Chan-Wook directed it. His masterpiece remains 2003’s “Oldboy” a story that involves a man being randomly imprisoned in a room for fifteen years without ever being told why, and that’s just the beginning of his troubles. “Oldboy” isn’t the most violent movie I have seen but it is arguably the most intense and as such it is a textbook example of how a movie’s visceral impact has less to do with the amount of gore one sees but how that gore is presented and what story it is connected to. A similar thing can be said with “The Handmaiden” but with eroticism. There isn’t all that much sex or nudity in “The Handmaiden” (although the movie does not shrink from it at all either) but it is dealt with in a highly stimulating fashion. For one acquainted with American cinema, this is something hardly done. Sex in American movies is either purposefully ignored to assuage the MPAA or subject to more purely romantic feelings. When sex as a vehicle for lust is explicit in an American movie, it is generally the only thing in the movie worth watching, i.e. it is pornography. It is very rare that a well-made American movie will show sex in a provocative fashion. (The exception that proves the rule is Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”) But such is “The Handmaiden.” It is a movie that could see Oscar nominations for costumes, set design, and makeup, and it is unambiguously and unabashedly erotic.

The title character, handmaiden Sook-Hee (played by Kim Tae-ri) is a poor Korean girl in Japanese occupied Korea in the 1930s. She is recruited by a legacy hunter, Count Fujiwara (played by Jung-woo Ha), to be the handmaiden to the Lady Hideko (played by Min-hee Kim). Lady Hideko has been secluded from the world since a child in her large estate by her evil Uncle Kouzuki. The plan is for Sook-Hee to help Count Fujiwara to seduce Lady Hideko. He will marry the Lady, take the fortune, and then imprison her in an insane asylum. Sook-Hee will keep the Lady’s clothes, jewelry, and large sum of money.

There are many power dynamics intertwined with the sexual intrigue and this seems to be one of the main things that Director Park Chan-Wook is particularly interested in exploring. Lady Hideko is in control of Sook-Hee because she is her servant. Sook-Hee is in control of Lady Hideko because she is an innocent that Sook-Hee takes care of. “Ladies are truly the dolls of maids” thinks Sook-Hee to herself while dressing the Lady in her evening attire. The Count is manipulating both of them and tricking the Uncle who has ruthlessly ruled over the Lady her entire life. What the Uncle is doing to Lady Hideko exactly is one of the bigger reveals in the second half of the movie. The truth is less and more disturbing than you would think.

I suppose poor people when they feel lustful, just have sex. Sado-masochism seems to be an outgrowth of an upper class upbringing that promotes ascetic values, commercial productivity, polished manners, but, try as it might, cannot do away with base animal instinct. What results is a scene that can be as absurd as it is erotic. Lady Hideko is prostituted by her uncle to his wealthy gentlemen friends in a way that blurs the word’s meaning. She is made up, completely dressed in an elegant kimono, and placed far away on a stage that doubles as a zen garden. The men, dressed in tuxedos, are on the far side of the room, and do nothing but look at her and listen as she reads Justine by the Marquis de Sade or some other erotica. Afterwords the Uncle auctions off the book to the wealthy men. So is she is a prostitute? Technically, the men are buying and selling books. Eroticism is truly known and understood in the eye of the beholder. Bring up a man to be a gentleman and dress every woman he sees from calf to neck in Victorian clothing and the result is that a glimpse of ankle will become scandalously exciting. As a sexy mathematician in a dinosaur movie once put it about a completely different subject, “Life finds a way.”

One of the movie’s main pleasures is the twists and turns of its plots, so I won’t go too deep into them here except to make one gripe about the way things are revealed. When a movie uses voice over, it is supposed to relate that a scene is happening from that person’s point of view. When a story is told from a certain person’s point of view, the audience should know what that character knows at that moment. Unless of course, the character is trying to deceive the audience. But I never got the sense that any character was breaking the 4th wall and actually attempting to deceive me. So why didn’t I know everything that character knew at the time they knew it? This seems to me to be a lapse in storytelling discipline. No I’m not going to tell you what I’m talking about.