An intensely pleasurable, lavishly shot dessert tray of utter hokum, “The Handmaiden” is a prime example of why we should be glad that there’s someone out there still invested in the overwrought Gothic melodrama, and that that person is Park Chan-wook. It’s hard to imagine anyone else putting this level of sumptuous craft and gloss into what is essentially a genre potboiler. And if the images that feel like ribbons of satin and velvet sliding across your eyes can’t imbue the story with Importance, they can at least take a lot of the guilt out of the pleasure to be gleaned from the fun, twisty story. Amid all the page-turner-y goodness, the exquisitely rendered sex scenes will no doubt cause some to crack open the file marked “male gaze,” but it’s difficult to credit that representatives of any sexuality could possibly object to theirs being presented so very, very prettily. Park has often been accused of style over substance before, but here, with his lavish pictorialist instincts for period detailing, costuming, and set design given full rein, the aesthetics trump the politics too.
The period is the 1930s, and the setting is Japanese-occupied Korea, where in the first of the film’s three parts, Sookee (Kim Tae-Ri), a Korean pickpocket who lives with a Dickens-style gang of crooks and baby peddlers, is recruited into a long con by The Count (Ha Jung-woo), a talented forger who has need of a girl to play handmaiden to the Japanese heiress he is plotting to relieve of a fortune. With shades of “All About Eve” and more than a dash of “Rebecca,” Sookee arrives at the impressive manor, and while never forgetting her status as double agent, begins to fall for her beautiful employer, the Count’s mark Hideko (Kim Min-hee). Hideko, all dewy-faced doominess, is the poor little rich girl prisoner of her Uncle Kouzouki (Cho Jin-woong), an authoritarian pervert with a black tongue and a passion for books (not all books, just a certain type, as we’ll discover). The women grow closer together even as Sookee continues to play her role in making Hideko fall in love and elope with The Count, before the first major twist arrives at the end of part one, and we segue into the story told from Hideko’s point of view instead.
It’s a mark of Park’s skill (and that of his DP Chung Chung-hoon, his two astonishingly beautiful leading ladies, as well his costume, set design and lighting departments) that the somewhat tired trope of seeing the same events happen over again from a new perspective never gets tiresome. In fact there’s a kind of visceral filmmaking glee on display throughout the whole second part where Park whizzes through back story and callbacks to the previous segment, all while driving the meta-story forward. And this section is also where we get the majority of those intricately choreographed and photographed lesbian sex scenes, including a delirious 69 shot from overhead, a vigorous yet elegant scissoring, as well as a callback to part one’s unlikely erotic highlight: the filing down of a jagged tooth.
Indeed the sensuality of Park’s aesthetic renders almost everything erotic in some way — it fetishizes hair pins, thimbles, earrings, coils of rope and inkwells, the clatter of shoes across parquet floors and the lacing and unlacing of corsetry (some of the costuming is so elaborately classical as to be almost avant-garde). And that’s not even mentioning the mirrored use of silver balls and silver bells, the latter of which come into play in a scene that suggests that, like an R-rated riff on “It’s a Wonderful Life,” every time a bell rings a lesbian has an orgasm. It’s a film of such luxuriant tangible texture and rich Asian detailing that were Park not from Korea, he might be accused of Orientalism, of the excessive exoticization of the foreign, in much the same way that he probably will be vilified in some quarters for daring to approach the subject of lesbian sex while not himself being a lesbian. In both regards, Park’s sumptuous aesthetic is in many ways its own justification.
And on a plot basis, he can hardly be accused of holding back on the pro-women agenda. With the twists and turns surviving more or less intact from the source novel, Sarah Waters‘ terrific page-turner “Fingersmith,” “The Handmaiden” operates more or less as a manifesto for lesbianism. And not just by instigating a women=good, men=bad dichotomy but also by exposing the wild, vast irrelevance of male sexual fantasy to the desires and erotic imaginations of women. It’s an impulse that occasions some of the film’s biggest laughs too (it is surprisingly funny at times) — Hideko’s expression, unseen by The Count, while he fumbles and mauls at her, or Sookee’s contemptuously hissed reference to his “tiny little joke of a cock,” to say nothing of the unexpectedly liberating scene of pornography destruction. These are such slyly progressive pleasures because of the assumption that the audience is composed of a mixture of women, and men secure enough to be able to identify with and delight in, women triumphing over them. It’s nice for a change.
However, there are missed opportunities too. The historical setting, and the clash of cultures between Koreans and the Japanese occupiers should provide more thrilling background texture than it does, especially with the vile Kouzuki portrayed as a kind of Quisling character — a Korean so pathetically snobbish that he hopes for Japanese naturalization and dedicates himself to the language, the literature and most especially, the pornography. And if we wanted, we could tie ourselves into silken knots and pant over whether, despite its beautifully unsleazy depictions of girl-on-girl sex, and a narrative arc of female superiority, on a broader cultural level “The Handmaiden” is there to service male fantasy in the same way one of Kouzuki’s dirty books about dominance play might be. It’s possible, but given the extreme glee the film takes in the celebration of its women and the denigration of its men, isn’t it simpler to assume that’s the side the director is on too? One can only imagine the trolling that would have occurred had this film been made by a woman, but it wasn’t and so instead, here’s to “The Handmaiden,” the deliriously fun, terminally silly latest film from Park Chan-wook, feminazi. [B+]
This is a reprint of our review from the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.
