The Handmaiden (Park Chang-wook, 2016)

Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri in The Handmaiden

Cast: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong, Kim Hae-sook, Moon So-Ri. Screenplay: Jeong Seo-kyeong, Park Chan-wook, based on a novel by Sarah Waters. Cinematography: Chung Chung-hoon. Production design: Ryu Seong-hie. Film editing: Kim Jae-Bum, Kim Sang-beom. Music: Jo Yeon-wook.

The fine line between explication and exploitation is carefully negotiated by Park Chan-wook in The Handmaiden. To one critic, Laura Miller, comparing Park's film to the Sarah Waters novel, Fingersmith, on which it's based, the film's  scenes of Lady Hideko and Sook-he in sexual congress are "disappointingly boilerplate" and filled with "the tired visual clichés of pornographic lesbianism." But to Jia Tolentino, they're expressive of the liberation of the female characters: "The effect is thrilling -- it's the most satisfying bit of wish-fulfillment and fantasy in a movie that is pornographic in more ways than one." Pornography, as Justice Potter Stewart once ruled, lies in the eye of the beholder; you can't define it but you know it when you see it. I, for one, don't see it in The Handmaiden: The scenes that disappointed Laura Miller and satisfied Jia Tolentino seem to me more athletic than erotic, though I side with Tolentino's conclusion that they're integral to the film's portrayal of a kind of liberation. Lady Hideko and Sook-he have freed themselves from the demands of men, from the creepy audience at Hideko's readings from her uncle's collection of sadistic erotica, and from the faux Count Fujiwara's manipulations of both women. In the end, The Handmaiden seems to me more successful as an ingenious erotic thriller than as a tribute to female liberation, but perhaps the truth is that the film is neither one nor the other, but rather a finely articulated blend of both.

Lady Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2005)

Lee Yeong-ae  in Lady Vengeance

Geum-ja Lee: Lee Yeong-ae
Mr. Baek: Choi Min-sik
Geun-shik: Kim Shi-hoo
Jenny: Kwan Yea-young

Director: Park Chan-wook
Screenplay: Jeung Seo-kyeong, Park Chan-wook
Cinematography: Chung Chung-hoon
Production design: Jo Hwa-seong
Music: Choi Seung-hyun

Watched on Filmstruck

The plot of Lady Vengeance is at least as complicated and implausible as that of Park's Oldboy (2003), the film that precedes it in Park's "vengeance trilogy" that began with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), and it's made with the same attention to style. But the way it's worked out on screen though flashback dribbles of exposition feels needlessly complicated, and the culminating act of vengeance on the part of the families of the victims doesn't have the presumably intended emotional impact because it's spread out over too long a stretch. As a teenager, Geum-ja had become pregnant and, afraid to tell her parents, went to her teacher, Mr. Baek, for advice. He took her in and not only made her a sex slave but also enlisted her in his scheme to kidnap small children and hold them for ransom. She lured a 5-year-old boy, Won-mo, into Mr. Baek's clutches, and when the boy was accidentally killed, Mr. Baek forced Geum-ja to confess to the crime by threatening to kill her own child, a daughter, who was put up for adoption after Geum-ja's conviction. Released from prison after 13 years because she convinced the authorities that she had thoroughly reformed, Geum-ja sets out to take revenge on Mr. Baek. We learn that despite her apparently angelic behavior in prison, she actually bumped off some of the more repulsive inmates, causing one to take a fatal fall on a slippery floor and slowly poisoning another, thereby gaining  the enduring support of her fellow prisoners. She calls in the favors she earned from some of these now released inmates so that she has the wherewithal to exact her revenge on the psychotic Mr. Baek, who has evolved into a serial killer of small children. The revenge, however, is anything but swift. The subplot involving Geum-ja's daughter, now called Jenny by her adoptive Australian parents, feels extraneous, as does Geum-ja's affair with a young man who is the exact age that Won-mo would have been if he had lived. I suppose Park has a thematic point about the corruption of innocence that he wants to make, but it isn't integrated into the rest of the film very well. As a commentary on the nature of revenge, Lady Vengeance doesn't have the resonance of Oldboy, and despite some imaginatively nightmarish scenes it seems like a mostly empty exercise in film technique.

Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)

It's about as improbable a premise for a thriller you'll find: A man, out on a drunken spree, wakes up imprisoned in what looks like a cheap hotel room where he stays, not knowing who put him there or why, for 15 years. His only contact with the outside world is a television set; his food is slipped to him through a slot in the door, and occasionally gas that puts him to sleep is pumped in the room so that it can be cleaned while he is unconscious. Then one day he is suddenly released and provided with cash and a cell phone. He begins to hunt compulsively for answers about who has done this to him. It's a mad plot, riffing on themes of guilt and obsession that are worthy of Kafka or Dostoevsky, but instead are cast in the idiom of horror movies and martial arts films. Eventually, the protagonist, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), will find the answers to what he seeks, but the truth will be more shattering than satisfying. Oldboy won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival, and no one who knows movies will be surprised to find that the jury was presided over by Quentin Tarentino, who gets the same inspiration from violent pop culture that Park Chan-wook demonstrates. The screenplay for Oldboy, on which Park shares credit with Lim Chun-hyeong and Hwang Jo-yun, was based on a Japanese manga. Park has said that he named his protagonist Oh Dae-su as a near homonym for Oedipus, who shared a similar fate when he discovered the truth, but Oldboy is closer to Saw (James Wan, 2004) than to Sophocles. Nevertheless, Oldboy has provocative things to say about guilt and revenge, and Choi's performance as the abused and haunted Dae-su is superb. Yu Ji-tae is suavely menacing as the villain, and Kang Hye-jeong is touching as Mi-do, who aids Dae-su in his quest. The often startlingly grungy production design is by Ryu Seong-hie and the cinematography by Chung Chung-hoon. There is a stunningly accomplished long take in the middle of the film in which the camera follows Dae-su as he single-handedly battles an army of opponents in a hallway that stretches across the wide screen like a frieze on the entablature of a temple. For once, however, a tour-de-force display of cinema technique doesn't overwhelm the rest of the film.