English Blog

A Movie “The Handmaiden” 11/8/16

November 9, 2016

“The Handmaiden uses a Victorian crime novel, Sara Waters’ “Fingersmith”,  as the loose inspiration to create Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. The result is a historical drama, an erotically charged thriller, and, most importantly, true romance. Park Chan-wook, a director, is very sophisticated, creative and flexible. I don’t want to go into the details of the story. You have to watch this movie. Park is not afraid of Asian style taboos. He knows the beauty of Korean women. Yet he is very humorous.

It is written in Korean and Japanese. I imagine I was the only one who understood Japanese language in that movie theatre that day. Japanese in this movie is not smooth because Korean actors and actresses are speaking it. But their Japanese sounds very erotic. They speak horrible porn language in Japanese, but they don’t understand as native. So they speak as if they don’t feel anything. It turned to be very erotic. I won’t be able to speak the language choice in this movie!

The movie is beautifully made. We enjoy “The Handmaiden” with eyes, ears and heart.