[This review will spoil the entirety of the film. The book
is fourteen years old, though.]
Sook-Hee is a Korean handmaiden to a Japanese heiress.
Sook-Hee is a thief who aims to lock an heiress in an asylum to steal her
fortune. Sook-Hee is the heiress’ lover. Lady Hideko is a blushing heiress, set
to marry her adoptive uncle. Lady Hideko is known for her live readings of
high-class pornography. Lady Hideko is an unwitting victim to a thief. Lady
Hideko would put her lover in an asylum. They hide themselves from each other
and from the audience.
I warned of spoilers, but spoilers couldn’t spoil this film.
The enemy of most twisting narratives is foreknowledge. If the audience knows
every twist, the string unknots, and all that’s left are dead shocks. Not so
here. Tension in The Handmaiden comes
from dramatic irony, the audience knowing more than the characters. As the
audience learns each characters’ secrets, old scenes acquire new subtext. On
first viewing, the audience knows Sook-Hee is fattening a sheltered heiress for
the slaughter; on second viewing, the audience knows Hideko plays the ingénue
to fatten Sook-Hee. Far from spoiling the film, foreknowledge increases the
dramatic irony, thus the tension.
Where Water’s novel was a psychological adventure story,
Park Chan-Wook’s film is a psychological thriller. To compress the essence of
Water’s five-hundred page novel into 145 minutes, Chan-Wook confines most of
the film to one locale. Barring the setting change from Victorian London to
1930s Korea, Chan-Wook remains faithful for the first two sections of the
novel. Both the film and the novel branch out geographically in their final
thirds, but Chan-Wook does not exploit this as much as Water’s. The extra
geography allowed Water’s to write a Dickensian adventure, with physical
thrills to supplement the psychological ones. Chan-Wook doubles-down on the
characters’ double-masked interactions.
There’s always a bit of camp to the neo-Victorian; even
serious melodrama winks with pastiche. Fingersmith
is no exception, and neither is this Victorian-adjacent adaptation. Chan-Wook’s
style occupies the superposition of serious and silly. His camp has emotional
depth. There’s a flashback in which Hideko’s uncle threatens to
institutionalise her in an asylum if she misbehaves; he, like a school master
waving his cane, tells her how the doctors reduce their patients to dogs. Her
aunt, who has heard this all before, fidgets, squirms, and finally flees for
the exit. Iron-bars drop to block the way. The aunt’s dignified walk back to
her seat, as though nothing had happened, is only the tragicomic climax of the
scene. The tone of the scene proper fosters a discomfort that threatens, depending
on the scene’s climax, to break out in either gasps or laughter. The best camp
and melodrama balances between too much and just enough. The Dickensian
villainy of the uncle threatens to turn the scene into a cartoon, yet his
villainy, and his ultimatum, is real to Hideko and her aunt. These are
characters the audience believes, characters who personalise the excesses of
the situation.
The excesses do not stop there; nor are they all unflawed.
The film examines the male gaze, the objectification of women by the sexual
drives of men. Hideko, like her aunt before her, performs dramatic readings of
high-class pornography for her uncle and his fellow perverts. Since childhood
her uncle schooled her to this end, to the most evocative enunciation of ‘manko’. Even as the men fantasise about
her whipping them (hypothetically a transfer of power) it is nonetheless their fantasy, and she is their
fantasy’s object. As an audience member one can’t help but squirm with the
gentlemen. But while they squirm from arousal, we, watchers of a prestige
erotic thriller, squirm at identification with these gentlemen perverts.
Freedom in The Handmaiden is thus
escape from male sexual oppression. Where better to escape than into a lesbian
union between our heroines. Neither objectifies the other, both love each
other, and only from that love comes sex.
Park Chan-Wook does not recoil from sex scenes, though I
wish he would. They muddy the film’s themes to no good end. Chan-Wook does not
avoid the lesbian sex – which is fine – except that he fails to avoid the male
gaze. The scenes are protracted, lurid affairs, not so much erotic as
soft-core. The lovers are objects to his male sexuality. It’s not just that
Chan-Wook is having his cake and eating it too. No, by villainising the
gentlemen perverts, and making the audience complicit in their lasciviousness,
Chan-Wook has shared a cake with us, then, when we’ve eaten it all, demands we
give it all back. Maybe there’s a deeper meaning here. Have our heroines
escaped one kind of male objectification, but, living in a patriarchal society,
they are forever trapped in another? Is the ending sex scene, which seems
triumphant, in fact a crypto-unhappy ending, foreshadowing troubles ahead? Well,
if so, the film does not earn these thematic twists. It would be
meta-commentary of a lazy sort, more an excuse than a justification for his
male gaze.
Although some of the themes are muddled and/or misguided,
they do not invalidate the whole (except if long sex scenes put you off). The Handmaiden is a blackly funny suspense
story. Should it come out near you, give it a watch.
An erotic psychological thriller... The setting is convenient, from Victorian era to Korea under Japanese colonial rule. Romeo is Italian but ultimately English. Behind the delicate Japanese ruling, one can express one’s pervert soul, that one should explore in imagination, in fantasy, but not in real life, and blame it on the ‘corrupted’ Japanese. However, it is unfair for me to accuse without watching the film, and I don’t plan to see it at least recently…
ReplyDeleteThe most innocent appearance wears the most manipulative heart. The two women are two deceivers, or nearly all the characters in this story are deceivers, they hide their true colours, and unmask themselves every now and then. But perhaps it is the impression of such, it is perhaps that we find it most impressive to see the artfulness among the expected ‘innocent’. ‘Woman’ culturally is expected to be raised to be such a creature — one that must be ignorant enough to be virginal, but clever enough to be always so… that is, she must be complex enough to see through man’s trick, but not let them knowing so…
‘Women’ as a gender are thus raised to be far more complex than ‘men’, but expected to be simpler, even when in spite of the queerness. We are confronted with the uncomfortable fact that the expected deceiver — Sook-hee is more innocent than the expected victim — Lady Hideko, and a ‘funny’ fact that male fantasy can be satisfied even without males… Or perhaps even for non-eastern audience, the male fantasy of exotic women… of those Chinese-doll like Asians, a fine line between innocence and pervert — a tickling unbuttoned white shirt…
Of course, the audience is horrified by the extravagant campiness of the sexuality (but what have attracted you to see this film in the first place?). The psychological horror and the thrill, an unexplainable escapism, in all thriller, to see one man killed after another… We are drawn to see a striking lighting upon the peacefulness of the lake — that of common life, conventional life. Life is so much more under the surface, dive into the ocean of fantasy, where moral judgment is abolished, or at least exiled. Of course you can start slowly, by watching the BBC adaption, or watch the 1988 Dangerous Liaisons, that the best sexuality derives from love (what a cliché and accepted moral for all these stories).