A stylistic treat, Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden is not a conventional adaptation of Sarah Waters’s lesbian-themed novel Fingersmith (see the BBC adaptation version).
But Waters novel about a love story between women in 1862 inspired the director of cult films Oldboy and Snowpiercer to move the setting from England to Japanese-occupied Korea.
The plot to defraud an heiress of her inheritance unfolds as a psychological thriller with radical twists and turns.
The love affair between Lady/Izumi Hideko (Kim Min-hee) and Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) ends with ultimate devotion in which the women outsmart the men who seek to dominate them.
The Handmaiden received universal acclaim from critics, who praised the visually sumptuous and absorbingly idiosyncratic feature from director Park Chan-wook; some even declared it to be a masterpiece.
Gay Directors: Almodovar, Davies, Haynes, Van Sant, John Waters. By Emanuel Levy (Columbia University Press).
As expected, the film’s sexually explicit scenes between the two females sparked some controversy, with some (not me) charging them as being exploitational and voyeuristic, relying on visual clichés of pornographic lesbianism.
I thought they were not only necessary but also well integrated into the narrative, showing both realistically and figuratively the women’s acquired knowledge of their self-worth and their need for physical expression of their mutual desires.
With the critics blessings, The Handmaiden was also a commercial hit internationally, again demonstrating the work of a master at the top of his game.
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