★★★★
Park Chan-wook is simultaneously elegant, clever and
passionate in The Handmaiden. The
visuals here have an Edwardian feel with dark interiors, heavy woodwork and
period furnishings, but these elements merge seamlessly with an Asian
sensibility that includes cherry trees in the landscapes and sliding paper doors. Park blends the two influences to create a
magnificent, English-inspired Japanese mansion set in the countryside of
Korea. The same Edwardian/Asian blend
carries through in costumes, which range from simple, high-collared dresses for
servants to shimmering gowns for the wealthy women and tight Edwardian suits
for the men. Even the hairstyles reflect
this two-world approach with women’s tresses sometimes piled on top of the
head, pulled back into a bun, divided
into hemispheres or left to fall in straight cascades. And all the while, Chung Chung-hoon bathes
the settings and figures with a soft glow that takes the edge off of low-key
lighting and makes The Handmaiden feel like a film version of an old photo
album. His tight control sometimes
brings a figure out of the background with a narrow depth of field, and his
color saturation gives hues a special richness.
It’s sumptuous movie to watch.
It’s also a very smart film.
In the long first part, we see the straightforward story of Count
Fujiwara’s scheme to use one woman, Sook-hee, to defraud another woman, Lady
Hideko. Perhaps the major surprise in
this part is Sook-hee and Hideko falling in love with each other, but Park also
draws us into the film by giving us a few visual teases that imply we’re not getting the
whole story. For example, why is the
white rope, which was once in a box in Hideko’s closet, hanging in a tree when
the two leave the estate? In a film as
controlled as The Handmaiden, such elements engage us and promise that there’s
more to the story than we’ve seen.
Park’s narrative whiplash begins in Part II, when we revisit
many of the scenes of Part I from a different perspective. The big reveal is that the Count has been
conspiring with Lady Hideko all along to use Sook-hee so Lady Hideko can claim
her inheritance. We learn that Lady
Hideko isn’t being kind when she offers to let Sook-hee try on some earrings
but rather that she’s following the Count’s suggestion to put Sook-hee at
ease. A similar reversal occurs in the
picnic scene as we see it in this part.
In Part I, the couple is snuggling when Sook-hee returns from an errand,
but in the same scene in Part II, we find the two pair quarreling until the
handmaiden returns. And Part II shows us
that the white rope was hanging in the cherry tree in Part I because Lady
Hideko had been in despair over her love for Sook-hee and tried to kill herself. This section of the film is a smart bit of
intertextuality that delights with a series of reversals, flashbacks and
changes in perspective before returning to a stable, if different, narrative
line in Part III..
Park also amps up the sex between the women in The
Handmaiden, though he integrates it well into the film. These scenes run long and steamy, perhaps
overly so, but the genuine passion between the women comes through clearly in
them. Given that this passion ultimately
undermines the Count’s initial plans, we have to believe in the intensity of
the women’s love, so there’s some justification for Park’s dwelling on it. And Park uses these scenes to reinforce the
characters. The commoner Sook-hee is more
robust and aggressive in the love scenes while the Lady is appropriately
tentative and discovering. Park also
uses these scenes to introduce a theme of voyeurism and to call his (male)
audience to account. In one of the
longer erotic scenes, Sook-hee puts a thimble on her finger, gently holds Lady
Hideko’s head and moves her finger slowly in and out of the lady’s mouth to smooth
a rough spot on a tooth. The scene is
laden with erotic overtones, and Park brings the audience directly into it by
putting the camera in Sook-hee’s perspective, looking into the eyes of Lady
Hideko while her/our finger is in her mouth.
This daring voyeuristic gesture points to more explicit voyeuristic
scenes later, when Lady Hideko reads pornography to the room of men and acts
out some of the content while the men set enrapt. In this self-reflexive
gesture, Park suggests that the male gaze in both settings is focused on sex, a
gaze as we see later that ultimately blinds the Count to the reality of the situation he faces
with the two women. The Handmaiden gives
us two women who escape exploitation by men even, ironically, with a male
impersonation at its end.
With so much to recommend this film, it’s not without its
drawbacks. For all the beauty and deliberateness of Part
I, this section of the film is overly long and feels like a movie in
itself. It consists of extended scenes
and more than a little repetition. The
sex scenes in the film, too, are unnecessarily frequent, run overly long and
risk falling into the very voyeurism they implicitly criticize. The film doesn’t need so much passion to make
its point, and while Park clearly highlights voyeurism, it’s not clear that
this emphasis contributes to our experience of the movie or comes to some statement. The Handmaiden also leaves us wishing that its
characters had more depth. The people we
meet here certainly have feelings, but Park leaves us to accept their emotion
with too little background or range of experiences among the principals.
The Handmaiden is a fine cinematic experience, bold and
beautiful. If the ideas don’t always
hang together well and the characterizations don’t run deep, it still gives us a
striking surface of visuals and story to enjoy.
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