We see in Hideko, the secluded Japanese lady, both a profound naïveté as to the ways of the world and a highly precious esthetic sensibility. There’s also the divide between authentic and fake, refined erudition and base cruelty, and Korean characters who pass themselves off, or recreate themselves as Japanese. Park delineates the indoors from the outside, the elegant living quarters from the basement of delights and terrors. To name a few: The obvious ones of male and female, master and servant, nobility and commoners, traditional and modern, Korean and Japanese (the script has dialogue in both), English and Japanese architecture.
In a mesmerizing 145 minutes Park opens up a toolkit full of sharp contrasts and opposites. The opening shot of a Japanese military unit marching through a small Korean village is one of the very few open statements that we are in the Japanese colonial period.
Park no doubt saw enough cross-cultural similarities to make the switch to 1930s Korea under the Japanese occupation (1910-1945). In Victorian society, as attested by its best known writers and artists, the polite gentility of the upper classes could barely conceal a vast underworld of crime, poverty, and injustice, nor the global imperialism upon which British wealth was built. Handmaiden is based on the 2002 novel Fingersmith by British author Sarah Waters, which takes place in 19th-century England. movie theaters, Korean director Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden. One of the most beautifully filmed stories you’ll ever see on screen will soon be showing in U.S. Left to right, Ha Jung-woo, Kim Tae-ri, Kim Min-hee, Cho Jin-woong.
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