Handmaiden is sumptuous but suffers from an identity crisis
Decadent tale part same-sex romance, part erotic thriller, part con-man film
The Handmaiden, mainly touted as an erotic thriller, is an adaptation of a novel by the English writer Sarah Waters called Fingersmith, about a pretty young thief who poses as the servant of an unwed wealthy aristocrat in order to facilitate an elaborate marry-and-steal scheme devised by an ambitious confidence man.
The thief, in the film, is named Sook-Hee (Kim Tae-ri). She finds herself enamoured with her coquettish mark, the Japanese Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim), and the plan to purloin her family fortune is duly complicated. It soon transpires that Lady Hideko is not as innocent of all this cunning and mendacity as she appears. There are sudden turnabouts and second-act revelations. Various parties are in on different things. The Handmaiden, in other words, is a grifting film — a selling point of infinitely greater interest than its reputation for graphic sex.
Director Chan-wook Park, has a well-deserved reputation for sensationalism and vulgarity, which manifest themselves in all manner of over-the-top violence and lasciviousness here — much of it provocative and none of it surprising. What’s unusual this time is Park has come in his Sunday best.
The Handmaiden is a refined and self-consciously sophisticated picture, always manicured and often sumptuous; every detail, from art design to wardrobe, to the arrangement of the lens, has a deliberate elegant quality. How discordant, then, those sensational touches feel. The flourishes of brutality (fingers severed, women’s faces bashed), the punchlines and slapstick gags (especially a cartoonish recurring image of the villain’s ink-stained tongue) — what’s all this doing in an otherwise earnest film about deception and love?
His most extreme tendencies, though, Park reserves for the plot, which, borrowing from and elaborating on the source material, bends, twists and folds back on itself with a complexity unusual even for a genre known to tie itself in knots.
For a time, this seems, appealingly, like one of the labyrinthine con-man pictures David Mamet was making over and over again in the 1980s, whose intricate Rube Goldberg machinations were itself a kind of art. But Park proves mostly uninterested in the pleasures afforded by the puzzle. He doesn’t go in for ah-ha moments; the revelations and disclosures, when they arrive, bear no trace of exuberance or thrill. Instead he commits to … romance.
The Handmaiden is, Park has often said and one will often read, a love story — and a florid, vehement love story it is. Which does make one wonder why this had to be a grifting film at all.
It may be telling that word from Cannes, where the film premièred, focused solely on the erotic at the expense of the long-con intrigue. Park was so engrossed by the affaire de coeur, and so little bothered with the fun of seeing his plot work itself out, that nobody could really remember what genre this film was supposed to be.