The Handmaiden -- Movie review

The Handmaiden

Directed by Chan-wook Park

This is an antiheterosexuality, pro-lesbian movie.  It's one of those kind of films where they must have had a committee writing the script, or a writer who couldn't make up her mind what she wanted to do with the storyline.  It keeps changing.   First they present the story in one way, then they pull a switch and go back over the same ground and present the same story, but with different twists and different orientations between the characters.  It is a very manipulative, contrived way of presenting a narrative.  It disrespects the audience.  It's disingenuous.  First I tell you the story, and I say, 'things are like this,' and we get to the climax of the story, and I say, 'Wait!  Hold on, it wasn't really like that.  Let's start the story over again and I'm going to tell it to you in a different way and then when we get to the end it will have a very different meaning.'  That is what they do in this film.  It is really two films presented back to back, but the second version cancels out the first.  The film is way too long and this is the main reason. 

There are only two good things about this film.  The two girls who play the leads (Min-hee Kim and Kim Tae-ri) are beautiful, and they play their roles with great sensitivity and skill, and the lesbian sex is hot.  That's what you're paying for.  A lot of the sex is gratuitous.  It was probably thrown in in hopes that it would sell the movie.  The rest of the film is confused, convoluted and cartoonish.  The plotline is not believable.  There's no depth or psychological understanding in any of these characters.  The two women are the most fully drawn and attractive, but there is not a great deal of psychological complexity in them, and the film distorts them by changing their characterizations halfway through the film.  The women are presented in one relationship and one orientation toward one another, and then this is all nullified and entirely different constructions of their characters are presented, and then in the ending of the film their personas change yet again.  So ultimately, these two very attractive women end up playing characters that are rather muddled.  We feel deceived and conned about who they are. 

The men are rather simple, and grotesque.  They are voyeuristic, cruel, sadistic, diffident, and dishonest.  They are presented straightforwardly and they do not change.  The sadomasochism and cruelty is a little over the top for my tastes.  Passages from Juliette by the Marquis de Sade are quoted and acted out to some extent.  This is done to make men out to be perverted voyeuristic sadists.  The men end up dead and the two girls go sailing off together into the sunset to live happily ever after in some exotic faraway place.  It is stupid and childlike. 

A lot of the film has a fantastic quality about it that is sort of surreal.  You could look at it not as a narrative, but rather as a representation of the internal psychology of the person who composed it.  In that case it is the inner life of a same sex oriented woman who is horrified and repulsed by the desires of men and who holds a low opinion of men in general.  But she does not perceive men or women in any great depth or with a high degree of sensitivity.  These characters are rather shallow. 

The film is partly in Japanese and partly in Korean with subtitles (yellow for Japanese).  This is something else that doesn't make complete sense, why everybody speaks both Korean and Japanese?  The two girls are good, but I don't know if they are enough to justify two and a half hours of this confused, mangled story.  Go at your own risk.  If you're a hard core lesbian who despises the desires of men, this is the movie for you.  If you're a man who likes girl sex, this may have some appeal if you don't mind being castrated.