The layers of the satisfying con artist plot keep us on our toes, and the acts are well structured and, yes, punctuated by eroticism.

Park Chan-wook’s sumptuous erotic thriller is among his boldest works to date.

The Handmaiden is the kind of film where stylised, sumptuous details are paramount to its success. Park Chan-wook’s thriller, is loosely adapted from the 2002 novel ‘Fingersmith’ by Sarah Waters and set in 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea.

It concerns the increasingly provocative and twisting relationship between Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), an heiress kept sequestered in a stately home by her pervy uncle, and Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), a crafty pickpocket assuming the role of the Lady’s handmaiden. The film delivers all the pleasures associated with the con movie genre: the layers of double crosses (which develop into triple and maybe even quadruple crosses) keep us hooked and slightly distrusting of all the characters, especially the wily men.

Lady Hideko’s Uncle Kouzuki (Jo Jin-woong) and Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo), Sook-hee’s initial partner in crime, are revealed to be essentially impotent. Much has been made of the long, graphic sex scenes between the handmaiden and her mistress, but Park creates a compelling erotic atmosphere even outside of such outré moments. The film fetishises accessories: Lady Hideko has drawers filled with delicate silken gloves and her corset, lined with tiny buttons, is made to look as invitingly intricate as the narrative itself.

With its near two-and-a-half hour runtime and those lesbian sex sequences, the film could fairly be described as self-indulgent, but every new outrageous act, every shot that pans over silks or furniture or naked bodies, feels like a wry wink.

The sex scenes, with their full frontal nudity and the line “It’s so cute!” in reference to the female anatomy, are intentionally overripe and become integral to the structure in ways too devious to spoil. While it’s impossible to remove a lesbian sex scene directed by a man from the much-discussed spectre of the male gaze, Park earns favour with his audience by revealing the two women to be the craftiest characters in the film.

Some of the discussion around The Handmaiden has placed it within the grand 1980s-’90s tradition of the erotic thriller, and while many of those elements can be found (with the lesbian con artist theme, there are shades of the Wachowskis’ auspicious 1996 debut, Bound) they are complicated by the historical setting.

The film doesn’t quite have the noir influence of so many erotic thrillers before it, but it does make effective use of a confused national identity, blending Korean and Japanese language and visual elements with a moody blue-grey palette.

Many of the scenes in The Handmaiden go on just a bit longer than you might expect. While this tendency can occasionally become cumbersome it also becomes Park’s test of his audience. In an early scene, Sook-he bathes Lady Hideko and files her tooth when she begins to complain of an ache. The tooth-filing seems to take a long time, but it builds a perverse tension. We may not need this much time spent on amateur dentistry, but we do need to see how sexual power can manifest itself in so many weird ways.

In The Handmaiden, sex itself is a con, luring us into the narrative and then complicating it more than we might expect.

Published 11 Apr 2017

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