The Handmaiden

For me this is my undeniable Number 1 in the PCW cannon & even beyond that it’s one of my favourites of this century. I don’t really believe in the term “ perfect movies” but if I was to be pressed for an answer I would for sure say Jurassic park but also this masterpiece as well cause it’s basically a perfect movie…. I have zero negative things to say about this film and I’m just going to gush about this for the rest of my days I think. A film that is just so in the pocket for me & has such clarity about what it’s saying & what it’s doing, I think for a lot of Park’s films he’s so good at the only letting you the audience know what I want them to know, when I want them to know it type stuff, a lot of his movies like this one you’re just so purposefully disorientated and for the first chunk of this film you think it’s more conventional & straightforward like you think you have all the cards but in the second half he just introduces a whole new second deck of cards & it’s just nothing but masterful, he makes you think you understand the movie better than you actually do but that second act just proves that he has the ability to be both incredibly fucked-up and hypnotically enchanting & it has not dissipated over time. A twisty tale of a bit of love, a bit of lust and fetishism, the eroticism has always been there in his movies but here it’s fascinatingly explored underneath this story of deception, lies and greed! I’m just so far convinced of this films sheer brilliance, it’s a FAT slice of perversity & kink wrapped up in this wonderful thriller & then when you add on all the political & cultural baggage on it, it’s just a fat juicy steak to me! Every shot & edit is exactly where it needs to be, just every frame is perfectly constructed. People don’t mention just how godly this score is for this film, the score just after the marriage when they escape is utterly transcendent & that juxtaposition where this is talking about one of the worst times in Asia history, everything is just so lush, it’s drenching you in these beautiful Aesthetics & visuals but never really undoes the grimness & horror of the actual story at play! I for one am choosing to have uncertainty on whether or not this has unavoidable male gaze in it. I just think it’s a subversive movie that actually escapes its gaze, at end of day this is a queer romance & Park Chan-wook's decision to openly embrace a fetishistic, luscious approach to lesbianism highlights it as the only truly love-driven component in the entire film. I bought into every characters motivations, the camera switches between exploitation & consent, the film is clinically omniscient whenever a male character is on screen & then he’ll shoot more dynamically whenever the females are on screen. We are more invited to observe the other female protagonists finding liberation in each. I’d say this is as progressive as it could be considering this is two women escaping patriarchal household but there’s a tendency to be reductive with it, if you are a male director you’re automatically doing male gaze. There is just a massive element of subjectivity to it, one person could see empowerment & the other could see degradation but their both looking at the same thing it’s just their personal idea of what feels right, what feels free & with sex scenes what feels sexy as well. The sexiest moments to me weren’t the lesbian action, it was the scene where she was filing her tooth down & that scene just is inherently not a sexual moment but it has this very tentative approach with two people & their beginning of intimacy, to me that just makes them not objects, the pair wouldn’t be in the slightest bit interesting if they were. Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri are out of this world amazing, I actually couldn’t believe when I first saw this when it first came out that this was Tae-ri’s first role, so confident and she just rules but I haven’t seen her in anything since which is a shame but she features in maybe the most wondrous sights captured for the big screen. It’s basically the coolest shit ever, it’s touching opus territory & I’ll leave this on a quote from the man himself which I think pretty much sums the films brilliance! “Everything that I wanted to say with this film was probably in the one scene where the women are jumping over the stone wall & notice how low the wall is, had she ever wished lady Hideko could’ve always jumped over that wall but the deep routed emotional problem inside her was holding her back, this person Sook-hee enters her life and she’s able to find love and through that love Hideko gains bravery that allows her that jump over the wall in a single breathe towards freedom.” BRAVO