Heartless ice sliver of seduction
The Handmaiden 18 cert, 144 min
Dir Park Chan-wook Starring Kim Tae-ri, Kim Min-hee, Cho Jin-woong, Ha Jung-woo, Kim Hae-sook
It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment at which The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook’s deviously kinky period thriller, shifts from being a lascivious slice of arthouse delirium to a dislikable contraption that meretriciously sells out its source material. But that’s what happens.
It’s certainly not in the first third, which adeptly ports the first third of Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith to Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century. Kim Tae-ri plays Sookee, a young Korean girl who is plucked from her impoverished family to serve Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), a repressed, hysterical aristocrat who lives in lavish imprisonment on the country estate owned by her sadistic uncle (Cho Jin-woong).
Sookee is not the ingenue she seems: in fact, she’s been hired by a devious playboy called The Count (Ha Jung-woo) to help him seduce Lady H, marry her, and then drive her mad. This information, gleaned in flashback, is the first of the film’s whipped-back curtains, narratively speaking; there are more to come.
Park’s films – this is the man who gave us the operatic revenge epic Oldboy, a vampire love triangle in the excellent Thirst, and the Englishlanguage Gothic stylings of Stoker – never stint on the lacquered décor. But their rather machine-like plots can sometimes turn even the design into a stifling impediment.
You’d have to give this film full marks for the costumes, and admire the manner in which bodices aren’t ripped in it. Rather, they’re sensually unclasped as early foreplay in the main relationship – the one developing between Sookee and her mistress. Park goes all-out with the sex scenes in acts two and three, and viewers will be divided on whether they’re liberatingly erotic or a male fantasy.
The plotting diverges from Waters as soon as we enter the second act, and the tension also dissipates when Kim Min-hee, in a necessarily opaque but inferior performance, becomes the focal actress. Cho, as a bookobsessed creep with an ink-stained tongue and sinister black gloves, veers close to a parody of a villain.
If it’s a twisty, heartless ice sliver of betrayal and seduction you want, add a star to this review. But I longed to be watching the film Wong Kar-Wai ( In the Mood for Love) might have made from this – one that asked us to follow the workings of the heart, rather than solving an antique Sudoku, and didn’t keep tricking us out of caring.