The Handmaiden
Ah-ga-ssi
Park Chan-wook (2016)
Pornographic writings are a significant element in the plot and it would be hard to argue that pornographic images aren’t also a major feature of The Handmaiden. By making some of these images seductive, Park Chan-wook implicates and disarms the viewer. The momentum of this brilliant piece of film-making is so great that, while you’re watching, it’s irresistible. The Handmaiden is ‘inspired by’ Sarah Waters’s 2002 novel Fingersmith, with the setting changed from Victorian England to 1930s Korea, during the Japanese occupation of the country. In spite of the cultural shift, the screenplay by Park and Chung Seo-kyung is – especially in the first of the three parts which both novel and film comprise – largely faithful to Waters’s storyline. The Handmaiden’s four main characters correspond to the principals in Fingersmith – a young female pickpocket, an orphaned heiress, the uncle in whose house the heiress was raised and still lives, and a conman. The class distinctions in the novel are amplified in the film by national differences. The ‘fingersmith’ Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) and the conman, the self-styled Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), are low born and Korean. The heiress Lady Hideko (Kim Hin-mee) and her uncle Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong) are Japanese – as Fujiwara pretends to be. (All four actors are actually South Korean. As explained at the start of The Handmaiden, the colouring of the English subtitles distinguishes the Japanese from the Korean dialogue.)
Posing as a gentleman, Fujiwara plans to marry the heiress. He will then, as he explains to Sook-hee, commit Hideko to a madhouse so that he can claim her fortune for himself. He recruits Sook-hee to work as Hideko’s maid, in order to help win her trust. His plan comes to fruition but not in the way that Sook-hee initially expects. The heiress and the count, with Sook-hee accompanying them, elope, marry and cash in Hideko’s money. When the threesome arrive at the mental asylum, however, Fujiwara identifies the maid as his deranged wife, and Sook-hee is committed to the asylum. The duplicity at the heart of this first part of the story recurs and builds in what follows – this includes Park’s hoodwinking the viewer as well as deceptions between the main characters. We know from the first part that, during the conman’s courtship of the heiress, she and her maid have become lovers. The second part moves retrospectively through Hideko’s girlhood and her uncle’s abusive treatment of her and her aunt; through the arrival in Hideko’s life of Fujiwara and then Sook-hee; to the later events of the first part, now shown from Hideko’s point of view. Park Chan-wook doesn’t reveal until late on in this second part that the two women exchanged confidences before the marriage took place – both thus became aware of Fujiwara’s schemes, and of each other’s involvement in them. This prepares the ground for the expanding, accelerating trickery and revenge of the film’s third and final part, which ends in the death of the male protagonists and the heroines’ escape to a new life together in Shanghai.
The sensual detail of The Handmaiden is rich and beguiling: the textures and movement of costumes, including their buttons and other fastenings; doors that slide open and closed, suggesting subtly and strongly a world of secrets and subterfuge; tiny but memorable sounds like the slight crackle of a cigarette paper as Fujiwara inhales. Cho Young-wuk’s gorgeous, exciting score, combining voluptuous warmth with dramatic heft, perfectly supports the narrative. The actors are impressive, Ha Jung-woo especially so. The conman is businesslike and inhabits his pretended identity with suave aplomb; Ha hints too at a cynical resignation on the part of ‘the Count’ that, as a fellow of humble origins, he’s bound to pay eventually for his fraudulent self-advancement. Kim Tae-ri and Kim Hin-mee capture very effectively the temperamental differences and the growing spiritual kinship of the handmaiden and her mistress. As Kouzuki, Cho Jin-woong has a more stylised theatricality than the others but he’s highly entertaining.
When Sook-hee first comes to Kouzuki’s home, the housekeeper (Kim Hae-sook) describes her master to the newcomer as one of the richest and most cultured men in Japan. The latter part of his reputation is thanks to his library. This turns out to be an enormous collection of antiquarian erotica, readings from which – by Hideko’s aunt (Moon So-ri) then, after her suicide, by Hideko herself – Kouzuki regularly offers to his male guests as arousing entertainment. Park Chan-wook physicalises the pornographic literature in various remarkable ways. A sequence that sees Hideko and Sook-hee trash the library – defacing the books then, for good measure, submerging them in water – is doubly euphoric: we feel the young women’s gleeful abandon and our own delight at Park’s cinematic brio. (At the same time, there’s an inherent shock effect in seeing the destruction of a library, even a malignant one.) In their final encounter, when he tortures Fujiwara, Kouzuki’s instruments of choice are his prized collection of antique bookmaking tools.
Most English-language critics have admired The Handmaiden. Dissenting voices have expressed concern at Park Chan-wook’s ‘objectification’ of women and what MaryAnn Johanson on Flick Filosopher terms ‘The male-gazey soft-core porn that undermines the female protagonists’. (I’ve quoted Johanson because her choice of words is striking though complaints about The Handmaiden have been made by male reviewers too.) The sex scenes between Sook-hee and Hideko call to mind the duration and explicitness of the lesbian love sequences in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013), which attracted similar censure. One difference between the films is that both female leads in Blue is the Warmest Colour publicly charged the director Abdellatif Kechiche with making them go too far; as far as I know, Park’s actresses haven’t done the same. But this critical line raises interesting questions about the presentation on screen of sex between women (and of naked bodies more generally). If a woman had made The Handmaiden, would the sex sequences be less objectionable? Or do the critics concerned believe that no female behind the camera would have created the sequences that Park has created? How is the ‘male-gazey’ issue modified if the male gazer at naked women is homosexual? The bedroom scenes in Carol are so relatively brief and discreet that that film may not be a useful comparator – but is it supposed that Todd Haynes was bound to be more discreet because he’s gay?
Fujiwara is unclothed in the scene in which he’s tortured by Kouzuki. It’s true that his nakedness isn’t fully exposed but, if The Handmaiden had a female director, would she in this sequence have been guilty of ‘objectifying’ the male character/actor concerned? Or does ‘objectification’ occur only when the naked bodies appear to be having sex? I can’t answer any of these questions – but I can’t help thinking that Park Chan-wook’s established reputation for stylish brutality has influenced some of the negative critical reactions. As someone who’d seen only Stoker from among his earlier work, I came to The Handmaiden from a very different angle: Stoker was remarkable partly because the whole film was drenched with sexual feelings but there was no bare flesh in evidence. For what it’s worth, the sex scenes between Sook-hee and Hideko seemed to me to convey primarily, sometimes humorously, the pair’s intense delight in their lovemaking. Sarah Waters, in a recent interview in the Guardian, had this to say about The Handmaiden:
‘Though ironically the film is a story told by a man, it’s still very faithful to the idea that the women are appropriating a very male pornographic tradition to find their own way of exploring their desires.’
19 April 2017