Park Chan-Wook wants to scandalize you. The Handmaiden, his newest film, is full of content many, especially those of faith, will deem morally objectionable. (That’s the first and only bit of content advisory I’ll provide in this review.) Set in Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century, Park uses the lush elements typical of the period piece to veil a more salacious text he’ll soon reveal. The film is structured in three parts, wherein Park and fellow screenwriter Chung Seo-Kyung layer thick a mass of narratives, intentions, and perspectives, like bodies folding upon each other in sheets and time.
The film opens on something of a warning: a group of children playing on a rainy, village street is commanded by patrolling soldiers to vacate the area. Our clever boy of a director is letting us know what follows isn’t a tale for young eyes, ears, or minds. Though, instead of a winking gag, it plays as a call to the audience to assume a posture of maturity. His images beguile the senses yet shroud profundity. Park will not allow you to take his surfaces for granted.
The complexities of The Handmaiden are embedded textually in the film’s separate narratives. The story concerns three main characters: Tamako (also known as Sook-Hee and Okju), Hideko, and Count Fujiwara. Its intricate structure demands that many plot specifics remain hidden; the time and place of narratival knowledge is key to Park’s thematic layering. At its most fundamental, the film revolves around a plot by the conman Fujiwara to gaslight Lady Hideko, a Japanese heiress living with her uncle, via her new handmaiden Tamako, and make off with her inheritance.
A main foregrounded element is that of power structure, or hierarchy (social, familial, political, sexual). Atop sits Hideko’s uncle Kouzuki, a rare book collector who employs Fujiwara to forge fake copies of his collection to sell that he may keep his own library in tact. Kouzuki plans to marry his niece Hideko for her inheritance (in order to buy books, just like a man). Fujiwara sits underneath Kouzuki, keeping secret that he is indeed not a master forger but a mere conman. The collector is his in to Hideko, whose inheritance he also desires. Next comes Lady Hideko who plays as naïve and sheltered, a perfect target to be convinced of budding madness. Tamako, a petty thief and the bottom rung, is in search of a new life, however it may come.
As Park’s machination is set in motion it becomes clear that what one character knows, or thinks she knows, is never really the truth. Part of the brilliance of the film’s three-part structure is to keep the audience at a relative distance while doing the same to its characters. It twists and turns like a gyrating body or slithering snake. Little details seen early on assume greater significance by the end: a rope, metal beads, a gilded snake. As the characters immerse themselves into the interior of Kouzuki’s country manor, they become further entangled by their desires and the roles they are called upon to play. Information withheld is their blindness. We become ever aware that these are pawns in a storyteller’s hand. At one point Tamako, in voiceover, says with contempt, “Everyone’s performing their roles so damned well.”
Story, that ubiquitous fascination of postmodern thought, takes center stage, but Park isn’t going for easy meta-layering. His main concern is with agency, and therefore his women. The oppression at the heart of this tale is rooted in the perversions of men, specifically those of Kouzuki and his patrons. Later in the film, we see that his book collection comprises a vast array of hardcore erotica. Buyers, naturally all wealthy men, travel to his estate to hear these books recited by Hideko. Park even visualizes these scenes as she narrates, toeing the line of the perverse. Is he validating the sexual power fantasies or employing them as a grander directorial statement? I’ll answer that question shortly. Hideko’s uncle has held her captive to this role, a storyteller robbed of agency, for she is the true object of desire. Her uncle, Count Fujiwara, and Tamako all long for her, yet it’s her handmaiden who actually comes to know and love her.
That relationship slowly uncovers one of the film’s more refreshing elements: its theme of subservience. It emerges forcefully through the convolutions of the narrative threads, through the fragmented perspectives and salacious imagery. As Tamako and Hideko grow closer together, a romance blooms. Their intimacy is the film’s saving grace, even when it too seems to give Park permission to stage sexual encounters that at first blush play as highbrow trash. But if knowledge is the film’s highest form of currency (diegetically and not) then sex is invaluable. When the women engage in sexual acts (originally staged as Tamako teaching Hideko how to engage with her future husband), physical intimacy becomes a theater of revelation. Bodies are intertwined like multiple narratives attempting to coalesce into a single whole. Sex is about subservience, and Park, by layering his erotica with meaning, locates within his erogenous vision a benevolent, loving heart.
The Handmaiden posits the act of sex as the highest form of knowledge. We only see the two female leads engage in sexual activity (apart from a fantasized BDSM whipping scene during one reading), so it follows that they are the only characters in this debased vision to experience true love. Men value their libraries, those containing their books and tomes and brains. At one point, Tamako attempts to enter Kouzuki’s library where he and Hideko are reading, and when the camera rushes toward the handmaiden as if trying to escape that sadist’s lair, a door slams shut in front of her where a statue of a snake guards the entrance. “Be warned! The snake marks the bounds of knowledge.” That gilded snake is a phallic metaphor of dual tendency: these men think with their snakes, yet they may also soon serve as their poison.
How sex is wielded by The Handmaiden’s characters and craftsmen is Park’s ultimate vision. Gaze is the undeniable influence of image-making. The lovers may destroy the books that hold women as objects for male perversion (“Down with the patriarchy!”), but the images which play at the finale, which can be seen as the film’s most pornographic even as they are embedded in subservient love, still underline the truth that these two women are still caught in the frames of men. Maybe the most potent act of rebellion for them is to maintain true love for themselves even while their stories are told by perverts to perverts.