Hideko is very young and, as we come to realize, much abused by the uncle who raised her. But, wow, are there sparks between the women. There’s little romantic chemistry between the fake count and Lady Hideko, and even less between him and the handmaiden, Sookee - they loathe each other. It’s when the twists began and then the twists on the twists that I started to get excited. I found the first chapter beautiful but slow, a bit of a narcotic. But The Handmaiden is told in three chapters, each from a different point of view, and each of them fills in gaps we’ve missed in the previous go-round. Sookee is meant to serve the lady, Hideko (Kim Min-hee), and push her into the arms of the devilishly handsome bogus count. He’s a Korean con artist with a scheme to marry the niece of a rich Korean book dealer, commit the girl to an asylum, then take off with her sizable inheritance. She has been enlisted by Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), who is neither a count nor, as his name would suggest, Japanese. The title character, Sookee (Kim Tae-ri), is a fraud. Different-colored subtitles help us non-Asian-language speakers follow as the dialogue switches between Japanese and Korean: different languages, different personas, different ways of styling oneself. That’s crucial, because the main characters - all Korean - are either pretending to be Japanese or, out of a wish to rise in society, embracing Japanese culture. Park has shifted the story’s setting from Victorian England to Korea in the 1930s, a time when the country was under Japanese occupation. The surface is classical, while Park’s perversity bubbles up from beneath.
But the formal constraints of The Handmaiden do wonders for him. Thirst and Stoker played like the work of an aging punk gouging himself onstage in an effort to look young, a kind of anti-plastic surgery. Over time, the director’s nihilism has begun to seem reflexive, his shocks coming for shock’s sake. I was one of the lauders and feel ambivalent about that now. Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, and the English-language Stoker. Park is the auteur behind some critically lauded and exceedingly cruel quasi-horror films, among them Sympathy for Mr. The Korean provocateur Park Chan-wook would be the last director I’d have figured would make a lush, romantic, crowd-pleasing melodrama like The Handmaiden, which he adapted from Fingersmith (2002), by the Welsh novelist Sarah Waters.
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