My review of the movie "The Handmaiden"

It’s 1930 in Japanese-occupied Korea.  Count Fujiwara (actually a small-time hustler from the Korean hinterlands) insinuates himself and his accomplice Sookee, a sometime prostitute and thief, into the household of a wealthy Japanese book collector and his niece Hideko.  The plan is for Count Fujiwara to court Hideko, marry her, grab her fortune, then commit her to an insane asylum.  Sookee’s job, as Hideko’s handmaiden, is to encourage Hideko to accept Count Fujiwara’s proposal.      

What the Count doesn't anticipate is that Sookee and Hideko will find their match in each other and fall in love.  Shifts in time, replayed scenes and voiceovers lead us through a labyrinth of withheld secrets and misdirection:  who seduced whom, who planned what, who’s weak, who’s strong, and the film moves from complicated con to the devouring love between Sookee and Hideko.  Their ravishingly beautiful, unashamedly explicit love scenes are as lushly seductive as the Japanese gardens on the uncle’s estate. 

This is a clever movie, but filmmaker Park Chan-wook has his eye on something that goes beyond cleverness.  Themes of dominance and subjugation run throughout the movie, from Japan’s boot on Korea’s neck to the control that Count Fujiwara and the uncle exert over Sookee and Hideko, to the pornographic readings Hideko is forced to perform for the uncle’s and his friends’ titillation.  Park has given us not only a mind-teasing puzzle box to unravel, but a  brilliantly filmed opera of female vengeance.