A sumptuous, intricately crafted psychosexual thriller…
Park Chan-wook follows up his English language debut feature, Stoker (2013) with an adaptation of Sarah Walter’s novel Fingersmith (2002). He transfers the location of the narrative from Victorian Era Britain to Korea under Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945), adding an extra layer of complexity to what is an intricate narrative of female oppression and desire mapped out against a background of shifting class and gender identities. The film is set in the 1930s at the height of Japanese colonial rule, and takes place mainly in a baroque labyrinth dwelling where the beautiful, fragile and almost spectral Lady Izumi Hideko (Kim Min-hee) – the only Japanese character in the film – lives with her abusive Uncle, Kuoziki (Cho Jin-woong). Izumi is an orphan and while she has a substantial inheritance as a woman in Korea at the time, she is unable to access her fortune as only men could inherit property and wealth. Instead it will pass to the man she marries. Kuoziki, who it transpires has some very unsavourily and perverse habits behind the mask of a learned scholar, plans to marry Izumi in order to get his hands on her inheritance. However, the appearance of another suitor, the suave but seedy Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) on the scene threatens to scupper Kuoziki’s plans. While the two men battle for the fortune by claiming ownership of the female body, Izumi seeks solace in her new handmaiden, Sook-hee (Kim Tae-il), without realising that Sook-hee, like her Uncle and the Count, is not what she seems.
As the men fight over Izumi, the relationship between Izumi and Sook-hee deepens, becoming emotionally and physically intimate. Through this intimate relationship, the women subvert the oppressive patriarchy which sought to subjugate women into conforming to relational gender roles of the time: a woman’s identity was dependent on the men around her, and limited to the role of daughter, wife and mother. However this relationship, like those that surround it, is based on deception. Like the gothic surfaces of the combination of Western modernity and Japanese tradition that shape the mansion in which the psychodrama plays out and the pages of the pornography that Kuoziki collects, nothing can be taken at surface value. In addition, in typical gothic fashion we are offered multiple perspectives of the same events through the division of the narrative into three interlocking parts, which shift between restricted and omniscient narration. The first two parts are told and viewed through the perspective of Soo-hee and Izumi respectively and thus privilege both the female voice and the female gaze, while the third part utilises unrestricted narration in order to show us what happens to all the players involved in this dance of deception. In offering us different ways of seeing the same events, The Handmaiden also functions as a meta-narrative on the operation of cinema itself and the mechanics by which as viewers we emphasize or identify with characters.
Since the hyper- masculinity of his early films including Oldboy (Oldeubo, 2003), Park’s films have become increasing more female centred, if not feminist: while Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjass, 2005) and Stoker (2013) focus on the relationship between the mother and the daughter, The Handmaiden is marked by the absence of the mother – the noose hanging in the labyrinth gardens of the mansion functioning as a visual signifier of that absence. Perhaps it is only through the mother’s death that the daughter can gain a sense of self-determination. But in order to do so, the father-figure also must die and his substitutes rejected. The only way that Izumi can be free is to reject the law of the father and escape the suffocating embrace of the patriarchal prison, both literally and metaphorically. Here patriarchy and colonialism collapse into each other.
In The Handmaiden, the architecture of the house is an extension of Kuoziki, the licentious and incestuous primal father who seeks to keep the daughter for himself. The library and the basement of the sprawling mansion function as disciplinary apparatuses through which Izumi is taught to cater to male desire by offering her voice and body for the male gaze. This is made clear in the flashback with which the second part begins where we see Izumi being taught to read with pornographic texts, learning to punctuate these tales of male desire in order to intensify the experience for the listener. Izumi is manipulated by men to become an embodiment of their often perverse desires: we see her giving private readings to Kuoziki and other men in the library, sat in the centre of a raised stage, acting out scenes as part of her performance. In order for her to be free, she has to change the narrative of desire from male to female, from a voyeuristic discourse to a bodily one, through the appropriation and reappropriation of the stories that she is made to tell.
While the childhood abuse and trauma leading to the rejection of men is a cliché in cinematic representations of lesbian identities, Park attempts to move beyond this through the character of Soo-hee whose sexuality is not determined by men, unlike that of Izumi who is forced to conform to both the sadistic and masochistic desires of the diegetic audience. Park also privileges the female gaze in the erotic interactions between the two, by forcing the spectator to vicariously experience sex between two women mainly through the use of close-ups and medium shots. In addition by repeating the key sex scene between Izumi and Soo-hee in the first two parts of the film, Park demonstrates that desire between the women is mutual and therefore free from the power play of heterosexual intercourse which circulates around the penis and penetration. Yet despite Park’s intentions to circumvent the dominance of the male gaze in cinema, same-sex desire becomes a spectacle in the repetition of the scene where the women first explore their bodies and sexualities together. Here instead of mimicking the female gaze, Park pulls back creating a frame within a frame through which the female body is turned into a spectacle that speaks of male rather than female desire. While there are multiple gazes in the film, the male gaze still looms large even when the male spectator’s diegetic counterpart is absent.
In opposition to the portrayal here of lesbian desire as pleasing aesthetic spectacle, small moments of intimacy between the two women are much more effective in speaking of female desire. For example in an early scene in the Soo-hee’s narrative, she is bathing Izumi. Izumi provocatively sucks on a black lollipop as Soo-hee pours fragrant bath oil and rose petals into the bath. Izumi complains that one of her teeth is jagged, and as was typical of the time, Soo-hee uses a metal thimble to file the tooth down. As their gazes meet, a frisson of desire passes between the women, and the relationship shifts from one of servant/master to one of mutual desire. In addition, seemingly trivial incidents such as Izumi dressing Soo-hoe in her clothes, or the two holding hands in the boat when they flee her ancestral home, have an authenticity which is lacking elsewhere. As such, haptic visuality (moments which evoke sensation of movement and touch) counters the visuality associated by the diegetic male gaze and express female desire at the level of the body rather than the gaze. These brief and stolen moments of touching are considerably more erotic than the explicit nature of the sex scenes themselves. For an erotic thriller, I found The Handmaiden lacking eroticism for the most part. One can’t help but wonder how different, if at all, the sex scenes between the women would have been at the hands of a woman, or even a lesbian director. There can be no doubt that Park’s intention was to circumvent the male gaze and attribute agency to the female gaze instead. While this is not altogether successful, the women in The Handmaiden are offered an agency and identity that is rarely found in the work of male directors.
Having said this, The Handmaiden is a beautifully composed gothic mystery which gives up its secrets slowly keeping the viewer’s attention despite being nearly three hours long. The cinematography by Chung Chung-hoon adds to the gothic atmosphere through the construction of a sumptuous textuality of saturated colours – reds, greens and blues – mirroring the ebb and flow of male and female desire that is contained within the walls of the building where most of the film takes place. As in all of Park’s films, the performances are exceptional in particular Kim Min-hee as the traumatised Izumi who transforms from the manipulated object of desire to a fully desiring subject. The Handmaiden is a film that one wants to return to time and time again in order to fully appreciate the intricacies of the web of psychosexual desire that Park has so expertly constructed.
The extended version is 23 minutes longer than the theatrical version. According to Park in an interview (2016), fans requested that an extended version be released. There is also a cut version which was released in Singapore. The differences between the two are not only in terms of the addition of extra footage but changes in the narrative structure in the first part of the film. In the theatrical release, Soo-hee’s deception is revealed in the first five minutes, while in the extended release, we don’t discover this until the woman are already lovers, giving the revelation significantly more impact.