Park Chan-Wook’s latest film, The Handmaiden, sits comfortably between eroticism and romance, between love and depravity. In a way, it’s about the difference between caring deeply for another person, and caring deeply about sleeping with another person. All of the film’s main characters are wrapped within a hyper state of sexual arousal, each held prisoner by their overwhelming desires. The movie draws the line between actual affection and perverse infatuation, but shows them both as equally imprisoning. We’re all at the mercy of the heart’s decisions, we’re all being held against are will. This is Park’s most beautiful film. Gone is the cynicism of Oldboy and Stoker, the sadism of Lady Vengeance seems like the work of another filmmaker. The Handmaiden shows Park taking on the matters of the heart, but like he always has, he does not avoid a direct portrayal. Trading in explicit violence for explicit sex, Park still manages to find a true emotion at the center. He builds the entirety of his film around a passionate love, and The Handmaiden is the best love story one will be able to see at the movies right now.
Like his most famous film, Oldboy, The Handmaiden unfurls itself in epic fashion, splitting itself into three parts, each part enriching the one previous. The screenplay, written by Park and Chung Seo-Kyung, has a novel-esque structure, a precise understanding of when and how to reveal details and how and when to reveal their importance. The titular handmaiden is Sook-Hee (Kim Tae-ri), a Korean pickpocket chosen by a charlatan con man passing as a Count named Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo). He wants her to pose as a handmaiden for a Japanese heiress, Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee). Fujiwara’s ultimate plan is to marry Hideko, before ultimately sending the isolated woman to an asylum and acquiring her fortune. Hideko is set to marry her stern, cold-hearted uncle Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong), but Fujiwara plans to break that up with a hasty elopement, and using Sook-Hee as a voice in Hideko’s ear, he hopes to convince the heiress of a tender love growing in his heart. Coming from a family of thieves, Sook-Hee cherishes the opporunity to split a fortune with Fujiwara and escape her lowly life in Korea, but when she finally meets the beautiful Hideko, things become complicated as the two women find that the only actual love is between them.
As The Handmaiden unfolds, various levels of duplicity unlock a complicated, noir-ish tale of greed, sex and ultimately passion. Various people are flocking around Lady Hideko, all interested in her fortune for different reasons. Kouzuki is a self-hating Korean who worships Japanese culture. What better way to complete the transition from one culture to another than by marrying a noble Japanese woman? Fujiwara, on the other hand, courts status. Material things hold interest to him only so much as what they allow other people to think about him. Sook-Hee just seeks freedom; freedom from having to resort to crime, freedom from having to perform these criminal acts at the behest of men like Fujiwara. In becoming close with Lady Hideko, Sook-Hee learns that the powerful heiress also wants freedom. The freedom she seeks is from the dictatorial Kouzuki and his multitude of sexual fetishes. She seeks freedom from her fortune and all the expectations that have come along with it. Most importantly, she seeks freedom from her isolated life, and for someone, anyone, to bring warmth to her chilled, monotonous existence. Sook-Hee and Hideko soon learn that the only way to really earn this coveted freedom is through each other.
Park has always been a cheeky filmmaker and his films are always serious up to a point. There’s lots of winks to be had. The Handmaiden gains a lot from Park’s unwillingness to make everything severe. He appreciates the humor that goes with human suffering, and few filmmakers make better use of it. His latest film feels like a mature turn, but it is still filled with twisted idiosyncrasies, characters with deep, haunting peculiarity. Ant yet, despite Park’s twisted version of reality, the romance at the center of The Handmaiden still feels like the most truly romantic thing I’ve seen in a movie this year. Sure, Sook-Hee and Hideko’s battle against Kouzuki and Fujiwara is indicative of the greater struggle of women battling against men, but none of that is effective if we don’t believe in their affair. Kim Tae-ri and Kim Min-hee are both giving ferocious performances, an achingly tender portrayal of female romance akin to the women of 2014’s Blue is the Warmest Color (though this film is much more effective, both as a film and as a portrayal of love). Through their love they understand their own power, and they understand that their path to freedom is through imprisoning these controlling men in their own perversity.
Watching The Handmaiden so soon after Moonlight really illuminates the similar themes that these films have, though they may seem incredibly different. Both films detail a love forbidden by the societies in which they take place, and both films are impeccably made. Moonlight is also an impactful film about the troubling dynamics of race in America, while The Handmaiden comments specifically about the divide in gender in an equally oppressive culture. Both films visualize this divide through a homosexual relationship, but what makes both of these films so powerful is how unpolitical they are about homosexuality. These relationships are no politicized, but their journeys of self-discovery are. Moonlight is a more personal film, more introspective. The Handmaiden is more cinematic, its screenwriting motifs nod at the audience more often. Park’s film won’t get the same kind of press that Moonlight will and that’s probably fair, but the two films are equals in the mastery of their story. They both appreciate performance, while also understanding the impact of a strong formalistic style. This may be the best film that Park Chan-Wook has ever made, it’s certainly his most traditional – if you’d call a movie as ambitious and scandalous as The Handmaiden traditional. It’s hard not to be undone by the complete beauty of this film, to not be torn apart by its depiction of love against the odds. I just never thought I’d say something like that about a Park film.
Directed by Park Chan-Wook