Seduced by a clever story of deception
THIS sumptuous-looking South Korean film, which was rapturously received at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, is actually based on a 2002 book by Sarah Waters.
Fingersmith was an erotic crime story set in Victorian England, but director Park Chan-wook has very smartly moved it to Japaneseoccupied Korea in the Thirties.
For the benefit of Western audiences, Korean speech is rendered in white subtitles, Japanese in yellow. The distinction is significant, because this film has plenty to say about the mentality of the occupiers and, more particularly, the occupied.
But, above all, it is a twisty, twisted, psycho-sexual thriller, in which, for all its explicit content, nothing is quite as it appears.
At the heart of the story, seemingly, is a duplicitous scheme by a conman, Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), and his female accomplice, a sweet-faced pickpocket named Sook-Hee (Kim Tae-ri), to rid an aristocratic heiress of her riches.
Hideko (Kim Min-hee) is the beautiful niece of a wealthy and depraved old Korean, Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong), who styles himself partly on English nobility, and on his country’s Japanese overlords. He needs Hideko’s riches and is grooming her for marriage.
But Fujiwara wants to marry Hideko himself, and sends SookHee to pose as a lady’s maid, so that she might soften up her new mistress in readiness for his seduction, which he initiates when he comes to the house pretending to be a high-born art teacher.
The plot goes awry, however, when the lady and her maid fall for each other passionately.
So far, so intriguing. But Chanwook is only toying with us. As in Waters’ novel, the story unfolds in three parts. The latter two revisit the events told in part one, but from a different perspective, and even with the suggestion that what we have already seen was illusory. It’s very clever, complex, sexy, slightly bonkers and thoroughly captivating.