‘The Handmaiden’ is stratospheric
OCTOBER 23RD, 2016 — POST 293
Probably no overt spoilers here, but seriously just go see it.
It’s been three years since a movie directed by Park Chan-wook has graced the screen. 2013’s Stoker left a lot of Park superfans — this one included — a little deflated. Since it was his first English-language film, and not actually written by Park, it’s been even longer since we’ve seen all Park has to give. Thankfully, with The Handmaidan, Park Chan-wook returns as writer and director (and producer if you’re keeping score) and in his native Korean, following The Vengeance Trilogy (which notably included Oldboy), I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK and Thirst.
Park piqued Western interest with Oldboy in 2003, a film that has seen a U.S. remake and is now widely considered essential viewing for anyone into movies. And for all the violence, incestuous sex, and cinematographic flourishes, it’s most enduring for its alien-yet-familiar story. It’s both a mystery and a revenge story — two story kinds that underpin a large part of Western cinematic traditions (arguably, the film noir and Western genres respectively). One of the most evocative moments in the film in this regard is the point at which our protagonist confronts the antagonist — the man who has had him imprisoned for 15 years — and literally gives him the choice between the two stories: Do you want to kill me now, or do you want to know why I did this to you?
What The Handmaiden succeeds in so brilliantly is maintaining a similarly historically motivated and informed narrative bedrock. At its core The Handmaiden is a story about using one’s wits to outsmart one’s way out of entrapment. The innate humanity of this — that no matter how bad your situation, you can always dig yourself out of it — sounds far more positivist than it plays on screen, but it’s there. The specific manifestations of the use of one’s wits and the ways one might be entrapped — the first layer above — is a story about a handmaiden put up to tricking her mistress into marrying an ally of the handmaiden — whereby the mistress will be gutted for all she’s worth and the profits split. As such, these machinations are identifiable from wartime Hollywood in Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, and Scarlet Street.
As such The Handmaiden is built from strata — and the most manifest stratum of the period Japan-ruled-Korea is wondrous simply to behold. Park is one of the most formidable aesthetes in the game, and in a world such as this — with ornate aristocratic Victorian costumes and set design — he’s still constantly working, never seeming to feel like he might “break something” (a sense that the mostly-single-house setting of Stoker often evoked). There is one moment in particular — when another maid tells the mistress that she is needed in another room — where a single spoken line is cross-cut over three (decidedly wide) angles at a rapid pace to deliberately lose the audience in the spoken flourish and play this maid’s machine-gun babble as a joke. It is such a small moment, and nothing but a small and utterly insignificant laugh would be lost if it weren’t executed as such. But of course Park and his editor do it anyway. This is the kind of directorial conviction you just don’t see in the West.
Just below the rich world is the stratum of the story’s context. And those familiar with the more “extreme” sides of what on occasion is called “Extreme Korean cinema” with that context. The Handmaiden has Victorian erotic literature, graphic lesbian sex, and plenty of subtitled “cunt”s to go around (it even gets briefly violent in the specific ways Park’s films are known to). Any one of these strata would be enough for a lot of movies, or might easily overshadow or outshine the others. It’s not just that — as with Oldboy — Park is able to drip feed us a perfectly portioned story, but that he seems to do it on a tightrope, blindfolded, with a stick of dynamite balancing on his head.
The mastery on display here is simply not to be missed. This could well be one for the ages.
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