Film / Reviews
Review: The Handmaiden
The Handmaiden (18)
South Korea 2016 156 mins Dir: Park Chan-wook Cast: Min-hee Kim, Jung-woo Ha, Jin-woong Jo, Tae-ri Kim, Hae-suk Kim, So-ri Moon
A deliciously nasty, daringly funny, beautifully photographed, disgracefully arousing and emotionally satisfying con artist thriller, Park Chan-wook’s finest film since Oldboy – with which it shares a queasy octopus sequence – meets all your writhing naked lesbian artporn needs while rather brilliantly passing itself off as a fable of female liberation. Loosely based on Sarah Waters’ crime novel Fingersmith, with the action transposed from Victorian London to the Japanese-occupied Korea of the 1930s, The Handmaiden is a three-part multiple viewpoint drama, sections of which overlap, Rashomon-style.
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Handsome, spivvy gold-digger Fujiwara (Jang-woo Ha) has come up with a dastardly scheme. His target is virginal orphaned heiress Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim), a pale, repressed beauty trapped in a gilded cage. She’s the ward of her wealthy, creepy, black-tongued old perve of an uncle Kouzouki (Jin-woong Jo), whose vast collection of erotic literature boasts such splendid titles as Decadent Girls Who Sell Lingerie. Naturally, the inky old sleaze has groomed sheltered Hideko to become his bride in order to blow her inheritance on augmenting his enviable library of lavishly illustrated filth. Fujiwara aims to get in first, passing himself off as a Japanese nobleman to seduce and marry Hideko, then dump her in the nuthouse and make off with her vast fortune. But to be assured of success, he plants street-smart young pickpocket Sookee (Tae-ri Kim) in the household as Hideko’s handmaiden, giving her strict instructions to lubricate the romance and tip him off when his innocent victim is “fully ripe” for seduction. Unfortunately for him, Hideko and Sookee swiftly develop a physical fondness for one another, which is cemented during a bathing sequence with a sensual tooth rub and a Lolita-style lollipop. As in all great con movies, the question now is: who’s scamming whom?
Although it’s pretty clear what’s going on here by the end of part one, Park keeps us engaged by piling on the twists, deceptions and depravity, ratcheting up the fevered sapphic lust until the young lovers break out the “bells of passion” (full instructions for use are included, you’ll be delighted to learn). While there are echoes of his early dark revenge thrillers, notably in a grisly finger-severing sequence, he also has enormous fun with the material, from the over-ripe vintage erotic language of “jade gates” and “secret wells” to an unexpectedly amusing attempted suicide sequence, with plenty of jokey asides along the way, as his camera fetishises the vast, sumptuous, gothic East-meets-West pile in which much of the lurid melodrama unfolds. Park’s sly sense of mischief and the tender performances by Min-hee Kim and newcomer Tae-ri Kim are sufficient to disarm all but the most sour feminist reading of this hugely enjoyable erotic thriller, though some may remain suspicious that male comeuppance is traded rather cynically for lashings of hot girl-on-girl action. And yes, there’s tentacle porn too. That really is a thing, though you’d probably be unwise to Google it at work.
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