The Handmaiden
A ravishing thriller-romance
“More than anything, I chose this story because the two women at the center of it felt so alive,” says director Park Chan-wook, the international sensation behind the Korean gems Oldboy (2003) and Lady Vengeance (2005). Park is talking about his new film, The Handmaiden, a hit at Cannes that is now in theaters. “One of the characters is a person with a dark past, the other is a person living in a desperate present, but both exude a very strong sense of individuality and charm.”
The two women are the Japanese Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) and her Korean servant, Sookee (Kim Tae-ri), who live in seclusion in a large country estate in Korea with Hideko’s uncle in the 1930s, a time when Korea was colonized and subjugated by Japan. (Curiously, the screenplay was adapted from a crime novel, Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters, set in Victorian England, which was made into a 2005 BBC series.) Sookee has a secret: she is a pickpocket who was recruited for the handmaiden job by a swindler posing as a Japanese count who is trying to seduce Hideko. This con man hopes to persuade Hideko to elope with him, after which he will rob her of her fortune and lock her up in a madhouse. But he didn’t consider that a relationship would blossom between the women, complicating everyone’s plans. “It’s a thriller,” says Park. “A story about swindlers, a dramatic story with several unexpected twists. But more than anything else, it’s a romance.” And from PROVOKR’s point of view, a very, very sexy one.
