The Handmaiden, film review: Part melodrama, part erotica, full masterpiece

This gorgeous, impossible to pigeonhole South Korean film is more than the sum of its intricate, dazzling parts
Matthew Norman21 November 2017

Once upon a time, long before the IMAX, children hid from the usher’s torch beneath the seats at the Roxy so they could watch the Saturday western all over again.

If any film seems designed to tempt adults to contort their bodies into doing the same, it is The Handmaiden. This “eastern” is so laden with intricate detail, and has such an array of intrigues bubbling beneath the gorgeous façade, that the urge for a second viewing struck me midway through the first.

After a stint in Hollywood, South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook has gone home for this loose but respectful adaptation of Fingersmith, Sarah Waters’s Booker-shortlisted novel of class, subterfuge, subjugation and lesbianism in Victorian England. He has shifted the action and sensibilities to Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s, a world every bit as formalised, artificial, hypocritical and lethally dangerous for young women, rich and poor.

There will not be a harder film to pigeonhole this year. Part riot of Merchant Ivory-esque country house-and-costume aesthetics, part psychological suspense, part allegory about guerrilla resistance to colonial domination, part Victorian melodrama, part festival of lesbian erotica, part hyper-elaborate con artist flick… The film, like its two central characters and the mansion in which they meet, is bursting with paradox. Whenever you think you have it sussed, it morphs into something a little different. Everyone and everything has a dark secret. Nothing and no one are as they first appear.

'Park steers through what might have been a pile-up between the variations in pace, mood and style'

As it begins, Sook-Hee (Kim Tae-ri) seems to be a distraught teenage mother handing over her baby under duress to a chorus of weeping from the women of her village. But in the first of myriad twists, she is Oliver, the Artful Dodger and Nancy rolled into one.

A flashback reveals that she was a foundling trained as both pickpocket and nanny by the local fence, who outdoes Fagin by trafficking newborns along with the pocket watches. Sook-Hee thinks herself a cynical sophisticate (from five, she says, she could spot a forged coin) until a grander criminal venture painfully uncovers that she has been flattering to self-deceive.

The self-styled Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), a narcissistic Korean grifter passing himself off as a Japanese aristo, pitches up with a fiendish plot to rob heiress Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee, sensationally good) of her fortune. To this ignoble end, he implants Sook-Hee under deep cover as maid to Hideko in the country house of Kouzuki, the latter’s villain uncle.

Another low-born Korean social climber, he apes and admires the ways (particularly the cruelties) of the colonial overlords. If and when The Handmaiden is adapted into a punk rock musical, The Vapors will earn a few bob from Turning Japanese.

The Handmaiden, in pictures

1/6

Even Kouzuki’s Anglo-Korean architectural hybrid of a mansion, where Sook-Hee sleeps in a cupboard, is trying to fool you. Within the stolid Victorian brickwork are delicate paper doors that slide away to reveal hidden rooms (including a Bond villainish torture basement where a giant octopus stands aquatic proxy for the shark).

Park dwells as adoringly on the fineries — the 50 shades of silk; the delicate lacquering framed by gentleman’s club oak panelling; the magnificent library and lushly verdant garden, each of which hides a monstrous secret of its own — as on the intimacies that liberate the women from the brutes who would colonise them.

'It isn’t easy for a man to make a sumptuously feminist movie, in which the one thing that is just as it seems is the pitiful inadequacy of every male character, without appearing to patronise'

Roused from sleep by sobbing, Sook-Hee comes out of her closet to attend to Hideko, and starts teasing her mistress out of hers. At first saliva is the only bodily fluid swapped, via a shared lollipop, and later nothing will be left to the imagination. But the bath scene in which Sook-Hee (in a nod to the novel’s title) slides a finger into Hideko’s mouth, supposedly to file down a jagged tooth, is overwhelmingly sensual thanks to its heroic restraint. Hideko conveys the spontaneous eruption of longing with no more than some gentle kneading of her maid’s elbow.

What follows is massively intricate on various levels, from the interminable unravelling of bodice strings (no ripping; only men, who understand nothing of female desires, rip) to the layering of deceit upon deceit. With the startling reveal that ends the Sook-Hee-narrated first of three parts, the sinister elegance of the double-cross has a John le Carré twang.

The complexity is ramped up again as part two retells the story from Hideko’s perspective. Park shows the same scenes from different angles, and echoes the same lines in different voices, to nuance their meaning. Even the subtitles are complicated by appearing in white for Korean and yellow for Japanese.

Somehow, Park steers safely through what might have been a multiple pile-up between the variations in pace, mood and style. Far from being cheap thrills, the three lesbian sex scenes of crescendoing abandon are integral to the women’s psychological development and the shifting of their loyalties.

In less adroit hands, the hopping between tones (searing passion one minute, wry detachment the next, Tarantinoid extreme violence the one after) would have felt preposterous.

It isn’t easy for a man to make a sumptuously feminist movie, in which the one thing that is just as it seems is the pitiful inadequacy of every male character, without appearing to patronise. Admittedly I haven’t checked my privilege, but I didn’t detect a hint of mansplaining.

After all the flawlessly disguised twists, lies and treacheries, this masterwork confirms itself as more than the sum of even such dazzling parts by ending with what we want to believe is a timeless truth. If its Good Friday release date is an accident, it’s a timely one. The one thing left standing, when all the artifice has been demolished, is the awesome redemptive power of love.

Cert 18, 144 mins

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