The Handmaiden (2016): First Impressions
Dir: Park Chan-wook
Starring: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong
Spoilers for The Handmaiden and Revolutionary Girl Utena
Part 1
The Handmaiden is a 2016 film adapted in broad strokes from Sarah Waters' 2002 novelFingersmith.The film tells the story of Nam Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) and Lady Izumi Hideko (Kim Min-hee). The film involves a complex series of schemes and counter-schemes as the viewer witnesses the story of Hideko and Sook-hee unfold one piece at a time, with certain elements and perspectives not fully apparent to the viewer until later in the film. The film is wonderfully aesthetic, with the manor that Hideko lives in expertly blending English and Japanese aesthetics. Ultimately, the film reminded me of nothing so much as the latter parts of the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena, itself a story of two women attempting to escape the machinations of men who hold them in bondage and finding love with one another as they do so. Indeed, some very pivotal scenes seem to evoke similar moments in Utena, including Hideko's attempted suicide that leads to a confession on both her and Sook-hee's part about their mutual schemes.
I'm not going to rehash the entire plot here; for a quick review, I will say that this film is a ride, and if you have not already seen it, go and do so unspoiled. So much of the impact comes from watching as the story unfolds and new perspectives are laid out that the viewer may not have considered in their estimations of Sook-hee and Hideko, who are excellently written and played by their respective actresses.
Part 2
The Handmaiden is also a profoundly queer film. Very explicitly so, at that. Some of the most graphic sapphic sex scenes that do not come out of hardcore pornography are featured herein, along with perhaps the single most dramatic shot of a person performing cunnilingus that has ever been committed to the screen. I've seen some online reviews of the film accuse the sex scenes of catering to the male gaze, and I generally resist such interpretations--though honestly, as I will get to below, I think there are elements of the film that trouble me regarding how it treats the erotic.
But the queerness goes beyond the literal sex, and while the film omits some of the male-male attraction that is present in the novel, the romance that emerges between Sook-hee and Hideko is one that the two forge in fire. They are both navigating dangerous circumstances and come to rely on one another and form the only genuinely trusting relationship in the film. They are the only characters who have sex, and their sex is raw and empowering for them, serving to portray a queerness that acts as a life raft in the sea of patriarchal power the two are drifting within.
There is a lot of kink in this film! Like, I'mma rattle off some of the content I took note of in this film that could give some sort of erotic thrill; we've got
Breastfeeding/Lactation/Nursing
Maids/Uniforms/Ladies in waiting
Littles
Oral Fixation (That bath scene!)
Drinking ink
Existential dread
Corsets
Dollification
Hanging
Cunnilingus
Tribadism
Fingering
Implied netorare
Ben wa balls (more like Ben wa bells!)
Sanatoria
Suspension bondage
Puppets
Spanking
Marquis de Sade's observation about hearing and listening to stories
Choking
Leather gloves
Ukiyo-e erotic art
Spitting wine in someone's mouth
Denial
Torture
and so much more!
The film is sexy! It's erotic. My favorite line in the film is a short one by Sook-hee, written during her first time having sex with Hideko: "Why does the candy taste different? The bitterness turns sour, the sourness turns sweet, the sweetness turns savory..."
HOT! It's hot!
That said, this leads to my main slew of misgivings about the movie. These misgivings aren't so much about the movie itself but about some broader conversations around pornography that are ongoing at the time of writing.
Part 3
I will say, before I get into the analysis of some of the more erotic politics of The Handmaiden, that I'm kind of mixed on the more "schemey" side of the film. The two main characters and their interior growth are all wonderful, but whenever we bring in The Count (Ha Jung-woo), the film veers into comedy in a way that I find jarring. I think it works on the whole, as it makes the tone a bit more darkly comedic, but I suddenly feel the movie's artifice a lot more whenever it happens. The Count is very corny and reminds me of no one so much as Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events. And Uncle Kouzuki is... the man is wild--a completely Sadeian figure. Literally doing his own miniature version of the 120 Days with Hideko, and at one point, directly having her read from a novel that, while he says is not actually Sade, definitely draws on Juliette and Justine.
So, the ending of the film. Upon confessing their schemes to one another, Sook-hee and Hideko devise a new con whereby they will be able to go and live together in Shanghai and leave Count Fujiwara in the clutches of Kouzuki, whose books they destroy. In the movie, the destruction of Kouzuki's library is a major act of empowerment for Hideko, who has been raised to be a doll subservient to Kouzuki's perversions. Hideko and Sook-hee smash the books under their feet in the water like they were pressing grapes or washing clothes, and so the destruction of the library and Hideko's own wedding night defloration via knife are major acts of personal liberation for her.
That said, something about this scene rubbed me the wrong way, pardon the expression. I've seen people suggest that what The Handmaiden is doing is laying a critique at the feet of pornography and giving us "empowering erotica" in its stead. The few times I have seen this ending critiqued, defenders will come to it suggesting that the portrayal of queer love and a happy ending out from under patriarchal oppression is a revolutionary thing to put in film, and I just question the ability of the ending to do that. If someone feels liberated or empowered by the film's ending, great, but I wonder what about it is liberating. Kouzuki is not brought down by Hideko, nor is the structure that allowed him to exist in the first place. Instead, the film seems to suggest that it is a particular regime of pornography that is at least partly at fault for Hideko's and Sook-hee's plight and abuse and that the destruction of the library is a laudatory political act. This is reinforced by Fujiwara's statement that Hideko's refusal to have sex with him on their wedding night is more alluring than anything in any book. A line that shows, I think, a really shallow regard for just how wide the fields of pornography and pornographic writing, in particular, have been for centuries.
It's Dworkin again. There is bad pornography that records and performs the oppression and subjugation of women, and there is good erotica that is a master of karate and friendship for everyone.* In her article "The Honesty of Pornography," English professor Kathleen Lubey recommends that we regard pornographic literature as literature, that we subject it to close reading in order to see the things that it can tell us about history, about social relations, and about the authors who write it. There is much that can be gleaned from Sade about desire, much that we can consider and learn from The Fisherman's Wife. The notion that it's just de facto disgusting seems more like a form of stigmatization than it does emancipation, to me, at least. While the destruction of the library is very personally liberating for the characters in The Handmaiden, I couldn't shake the impression that The Handmaiden was suggesting that it was pornography itself that had antagonized the characters and stood as a metonymy for patriarchy. This perspective completely elides so much of how pornographic writing can function to open up avenues for personal exploration, by reducing it all to a kind of propaganda in service of hegemony.
This is one reason why I'm struck, at the end of the movie, by the choice to go to Shanghai instead of Vladivostok. The film's final shots pan out from the boat as Sook-hee and Hideko reclaim the bells that had featured in Hideko's abusive upbringing. It's sad and beautiful, two bells ringing in the dark, because while the plan to go to Vladivostok was initially the Count's plan, and Shanghai is probably an attempt, in-universe, to escape Kouzuki's clutches (Sook-hee and Hideko don't know that he's dead), it means that they are heading into a place that is about to encounter an even more brutal form of Japanese imperialism.
Stray observations:
Love that octopus.
That scene where we learn that Sook-hee's mother kind of gave her an affirming speech, and it's implied that the words were meant as a vindictive jab at the society that had caught her is so metal.
Someone who knows the languages could probably pick up on many of the elements of code-switching that are in play with the characters swapping between Korean and Japanese.
Along those lines, there's one moment where a maid shows up briefly for some business and just spits Japanese with some of the fastest flow I've ever heard. Rap goddess.
Definitely want to see readings about this one that examine the colonialism of it all.
*I know that Dworkin actually resisted the erotica/pornography distinction made by figures like Gloria Steinem, tending to argue that while so-called erotica was better produced, it served the same function as pornography. I generally also resist this distinction, but more for the reason that I think it reifies the whole "good-sex/bad-sex" dichotomy that serves as a linguistic tool for legislating certain forms of sexual expression. The argument that "erotica" foregrounds mutualism seems to take for granted what goes on inside the heads of performers in a way I find patronizing. Some day, I'll go on my spiel about the problematic nature of SSC (really, that second 'S').