David Hast: Scott, have you seen The Handmaiden?
Scott Vander Werf: I have seen The Handmaiden. This is a film directed by Park Chan Wook and who's most known for Oldboy from 2003, the second in the Vengeance trilogy. I've also seen his vampire movie from 2009, Thirst. And I very much love his movies and I love The Handmaiden.
DH: Yeah, I guess he is. Would you say he's most famous for the that Violent Trilogy at the beginning of his career?
SVW: Well Oldboy is an iconic film. Oldboy is probably, after now that Parasite, you know won the Oscars, that's probably the most best known in the west of the Korean, South Korean films but before that old boy was a big, big hit.
DH: Yeah parasite of course is by Bong Joon-ho who we did our last show on. I guess it would be fair to say that to Americans Right now these two Korean directors are the best known, right?
SVW: Best known in terms of streaming, the streaming areas, there are a lot of South Korean TV shows that are really famous too, that I'm not really aware of, but there's people that are on Netflix and elsewhere are very addicted to some of the South Korean dramas and comedies.
DH: Yeah, and I watch more movies than TV series, and I have seen a number of other Korean films, but we're not gonna get into those now. There are lots of good South Korean directors, but these are the two with the biggest profile right now in the United States.
SVW: And The Handmaiden is actually based on a novel by a British writer, Sarah Waters. The novel is called Fingersmith. It takes place in the Victorian era of Britain and a Fingersmith was like a pickpocket or a hustler, a crook.
DH: So there's a lot to talk about with this movie and you have to be careful because this is definitely a kind of thriller with many reversals. It's an exciting film to watch in a lot of ways, because of the plot and also because I think a big difference between Park Chan Wook and Bong Joon Ho is Wook is extremely stylish or stylized, right? The look of his films and this one certainly is that way just like the Vengeance trilogy and he, not always realistic I guess you'd say. How would you describe his style?
SVW: I would say that he's very much sort of the room within the room within the room sort of look. In some ways, there's the scene where you enter into this giant mansion at one point, where the one character who's a servant, who's one of the hustlers, and you just see all of these layers of this room, and it reminded me of Citizen Kane.
DH: Yeah, he's very right. He's consciously doing a lot of the visually stylish things that are great in cinema. And his use of plot does that too. In Decision to Leave, his latest one, he has this thing where characters are observing each other, like kind of spying on each other, and then all of a sudden they're in the room with the other person and you're like, what's going on? Is this a flashback or how could they be there? And is it just their point of view? Are they spying on this person? Are they imagining that they're in there with them? Very confusing in a way, and turns out to be an important part of the movie.
SVW: We can't give any spoilers with a movie like The Handmaid.
DH: Okay, so the plot as it starts to play out at the beginning of the movie is we have this young Korean woman who's like a small-time thief and pickpocket. And she's enlisted by this Korean man who is also kind of underworld, and he says, you're going to be part of this scam. I am involved with this Japanese aristocrat who lives with her incredibly rich uncle who's a Korean but has this incredible collection of weird books. And he's really rich, and we want to steal his money. And you'll get a lot, and what you have to do is you're going to be hired as her maid. She's very naive and unworldly. And you're going to draw her in, and ultimately, I'm going to marry her, and we're going to then get her thrown into a mental institution and we'll have her money.
SVW: And we'll split it.
DH: Yeah.
SVW: And that's the beginning of the film, but it just opens up. So many different layers between all the different characters. We really don't know the year but it's in Korea under Japanese colonial rule.
DH: They say it's in the 30s.
SVW: Oh it is in the 30s. Okay And yeah in Japan occupied Korea until the end of world war two essentially.
DH: Right and I mean, I can't get all the complexities there and symbolism and all that but obviously they dominated Korea and that's a theme in the movie.
SVW: The other thing is that there were collaborators. It's not just this Japanese woman that the two grifters are trying to con. It's also the person who is basically, has her captive or hostage. And he's, when I was watching it, I thought that he was actually Japanese, but he's a, he's a Korean collaborator. He's somebody who collaborated with the Japanese, helped them in their occupation. And he was given a gold mine as his, basically as his payment. and that's where he gets his wealth. He's also into antique books or rare books, but they're all erotic or pornographic books.
DH: Right, which becomes an important part of the story. Yeah, the whole Japanese-Korean connection is really, you have to watch the movies a bunch of times, I guess, or you have to know more about it, or know the language. Because when you watch the movie, there's both languages. They use yellow subtitles for Japanese and white subtitles for Korean. Most of it's Korean.
But often in the middle of conversations, the characters will switch to Japanese. So there's things going on unspoken that we don't always understand. My favorite thing about the movie was just that it's such a clever plot. I mean, there's a reversal, and then there's another reversal, and nothing's what you think as the movie goes along until it is, until you get what's really going on.
SVW: And if you've seen Oldboy, you know this sort of convention that he has, but this is Oldboy on steroids.
DH: Yeah. And that's one thing we should say. This movie, none of his movies are for everyone. The Vengeance Trilogy is extremely violent. You know, it's influenced by directors like Quentin Tarantino, and in return influences him back. He's influenced by a lot of violence in Asian films. And I mean, those films are... And this film has a lot of violence, it has torture.
SVW: And it has very explicit sex scenes as well in something that you need to take into, and we have to, in terms of recommending this film, this is not a family movie.
DH: Yeah, and also another thing to be aware of, without giving anything away, but a lot of the sexuality is with women, between women, and then there's also a lot of violence, sexual, and other kinds of violence against women.
And it does open the question, you know, it's really tricky because this book, it's based on a book that was written by a woman, right?
SVW: Written by a woman who's a lesbian and the book apparently has a lot of very erotic, almost pornographic sex scenes as well.
DH: And it has the sadistic uncle and all that, but then it does beg the question when you say, when you see like the, you know, this eroticism that's female and it's shot by, it's directed by a man with a male cinematographer as cinematographers typically are, it does, it brings back that the famous theoretical film concept which is about 50 years old. In 1973-ish, Laura Mulvey came up with this term the male gaze, the idea that most movies really present it a male point of view, a male psychological, male sexual point of view, and that is pretty demonstrable. And so it does raise that question, since this movie was the main, the director and the cinematographer are both male.
SVW: And basically the critical response for this film was like 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was very positive, but Laura Miller at Slate Magazine was very disappointed in the sex scenes in the film and called them boilerplate pornographic.
DH: Yeah, so it's not for everybody in terms of some people shouldn't watch his movies if you're squeamish about violence for sure, because they're pretty violent. But it also raises certain questions like we've just discussed. But there's one thing you can't deny is that he's a brilliant filmmaker. And this film is a fascinating movie.
SVW: And it's another from a director who rose in the 90s as part of the South Korean cinema renaissance.
DH: Great stuff. Thank you, Scott.
