![]() ![]() (There’s still a bit of a stigma in South Korea against actors who get naked on camera.) The four principals are all excellent, with Ha playing up his character’s casual brutishness but cutting that with some clowning in the scenes where the count tells Soo-kee how to act like a maid. It’s hot, though, with the two actresses committing to the scenes and the nudity involved. That said, Park still runs into the intractable problem of men directing movies about lesbians: They always show either too little sex or too much. The filmmakers depict male sexuality as loathsome, which contrasts with the lyrical lesbian sex scenes and partially mitigates their length and explicitness. ![]() So skilled is Park that you readily indulge him the occasional pirouette for effect as he and cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon create visuals of great beauty and also a number of startling images, from a lady in a white kimono strangling herself while wearing black leather gloves to a sex demonstration involving a life-sized marionette that’s both wondrous and deeply unclean. A visual motif of buttons and beads runs through the film, including a kinky way at the very end. ![]() His camera prowls with icy precision through the sumptuous halls and gardens of the lady’s estate, and he executes a number of breathless montages, one with a series of fades to black and another intercut with repeated shots of Lady Hideko eating one grain of rice at a time from a bento box. The director has always had a sharp visual sense, but he’s operating at an astonishing pitch here even for him. That’s a familiar spot for a character in Park’s films. But the two women fall in love and share a night of blindingly passionate sex, and then a second, far meaner twist happens that leaves Soo-kee in a cold, lonely place plotting bloody revenge. An urbane Korean con artist styling himself as Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) means to marry Lady Hideko and lock her up in a madhouse after he gets her money, and he’s planted Soo-kee in her home to make sure the fragile and highly sheltered lady runs off with him. Nam Soo-kee (Kim Tae-ri) starts out as an illiterate pickpocket who fakes her way into a job as a personal maid to Lady Hideko Izumi (Kim Min-hee), a wealthy Japanese heiress who has spent her life confined to her estate by her book-collecting ogre of an uncle (Jo Jin-woong). ![]() Instead, this nasty, perverted, and highly enjoyable erotic thriller is the most ferocious movie about matters of the heart since Dangerous Liaisons.Īdapted from Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, the script shifts the setting from 1860s London to 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea. However, you figure the guy who made Oldboy and Stoker isn’t going to make a tender little love story. It’s a big deal, then, for a director of Park Chan-wook’s stature to make The Handmaiden, a film centered on a lesbian romance, which is playing in Grapevine and slated for expansion to Fort Worth. Homosexuality is legal in South Korea, but a majority of people still disapprove, so it seldom comes up in either polite conversation or cinema. It does not store any personal data.Korean movies don’t talk about homosexuality. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. ![]()
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