Whoops. 2021.

 Annnd that year happened. Technically.

Sigh. 2020.

I forgot to write a post yesterday. 😑

Duplicity and Madness: The Handmaiden

Hooo boyyy it's already the end of 2019 and everyone is wondering where the time has gone! So, quick catch-up: I am still married, still a librarian, and—wait a hot second, this here is new—I now co-own a house. It's a fancy tri-level with a working hot water tank and everything. There are windows, and doors, and also I found this broken bust of Nefertiti in the basement that wasn't filled with drugs, so it's probably a cursed idol and I will have to deal with that at some point. All of the other things in my life are still pretty much the same, especially the whole lovin' movies thing. Oh, but I do a podcast now, which is also new. I do not have a voice meant for broadcasting, but it's fun, and part of my job, so whatever.

"I wish I'd never come here. It was wrong to come."

—Sook-hee, feeling either guilty or jealous

"I wish I'd never been born."

—Hideko, in sadness and in rage

Not rated. There's nudity, sex, violence, sweary bits, depictions of death, child abuse, etc.

Without further procrastination—because it is now the 31st of December which means that I left writing this to the last possible minute—let's talk about The Handmaiden. Inspired by Sarah Water's "Fingersmith" and directed by Park Chan-wook (who also directed Stoker and Oldboy), this film is stylistically what I'm all about. You know those films where pretty much every frame is a work of art? Yeah...Park knows his stuff. In fact...I'm going to present a series of images and let them help me tell the story. It's not because I am so out of practice that I cannot be bothered to string the narrative together with words alone. Wait, no, that's exactly why.

Sook-hee sets out on her flawed hero’s journey, leaving the dismal squalor of her home behind. We do not know anything about her other than we are super glad that she doesn’t have to spend any more of the movie in this crap-hole of a village. The story takes place during the 1930s in Korea under Japanese occupation. Occupied nations tend not to, uh…do too well, as evidenced by poverty, hunger, famine, too many babies, general oppression—you know, the usual. Three cheers for Sook-hee leaving this awful, awful place for a much brighter future! Fewer cheers for those who remain behind to take care of all those screaming babies. :(

‘Count’ Fujiwara is a con man through and through, in the game only for the money (or so he likes to tell himself). His latest scheme is to seduce an insanely rich heiress named Lady Hideko in order to marry her, obtain legal claim to her fortune, and then commit her to an asylum. To help achieve this dastardly dream, he uses the talents of Sook-hee—orphaned pickpocket mentioned above—to pose as Hideko’s new handmaiden. Sook-hee wriggles her way into Hideko’s life in order to gain the woman’s trust and use it against her, planting seeds about what a cool guy Fujiwara is: Wow yeah you should definitely marry him. BUT WAIT THERE’S A TWIST. Oh, and then another twist. Two twists? Whoa. But before we get to that…check out Fujiwara’s amazing mise-en-scène. The guy’s a poseur (huhuhu see what I did there huhu).

Sook-hee’s life is looking up! She is now living at the manor, a decadent structure with architecture that is half European-half Japanese and damn it would be pretty cool to live there if you were into having a library filled solely with ancient erotica in a room featuring rearrangeable floorboards concealing tiny...swimming pools?…and a cursed snake statue thing of which I do not fully understand the origin and/or meaning. Anywho, the manor is this dope because it belongs to Hideko’s uncle, Kouzuki, who got rich by colluding with the Japanese pre-invasion so that he might be granted rights to a gold mine. Feels bad, man. Kouzuki is straight up the worst, and you will never convince anyone otherwise. His ew factor may be off the charts, but the dude is loaded, so he owns extensive land and a few gardens. Don’t blame the gardens for his creepiness, just enjoy frolicking through the sculpted greenery like dear ol’ Sook-hee.

Here’s the library I was talking about. I’m a librarian (#secondmentionmeansitsbragging), and I like a well-organized collection with grandiose pillars 'n' shit just as much as the next person, but even I gotta admit that this room has a funky vibe. And when I say ‘funky’…turns out it is also a stage for Hikedo when she performs her…'readings'…for Uncle Kouzuke's exclusively male guests. >_>

Quick! Let’s move on to Hideko and Sook-hee’s blossoming romance! It’s not all gross weirdness, see?! I mean, it’s kind of weird because there’s a double-cross (oh, no!) and then a triple-cross (wait, really?), but if the love these two share cannot withstand the emotional repression and stifling gender-based expectations so innate in a patriarchal society during early 1900s Japanese-Korean culture, then I just don’t think that there is anything worth believing in anymore. Anyway, they both deserve better than what the world has planned for them, and gosh dang it they’re going to find a way to be happy! Hideko with her innocence and individualism stripped away at such a young age deserves happiness. Sook-hee with her personal growth and eventual redemption deserves happiness. Go get it!

Yeah alright I admit that there are some odd vibes around these two, too. Honestly, I think the mood is just used to set up some foreshadowing, but the uncertainty of what is going to happen to either of these women hangs heavy over many scenes. Check out the super suss The Double shit right here. And I don’t mean the one with Richard Gere, I mean the one by Richard Ayoade. Trivia fun fact! The film's English title is"The Handmaiden," meaning Sook-hee, but the Korean title is "The Lady," i.e., Hideko. Are they so easily interchangeable? Let's find out.

The only thing I have written down in my notes for this image is "dressed in virginal white." If I am remembering it right, this is when Count Fujiwara is seducing Lady Hideko. Soon, they will elope. Yes—they tie the knot, which is not a good thing for at least 2/3 of the parties involved.

At this point, I was getting tied up in the story, so my notes dwindle down to just a couple of words per thought. Here, I jotted down "behind glass." Thanks, past Rachel, that is super helpful. The sentiment is obvious, though: Hideko and Sook-hee are women in a time period when aesthetic beauty was aligned directly with their worth. They are groomed into sculpting themselves for the enjoyment of others, a carefully dressed display. Even Sook-hee starts out by viewing her mistress as more of an object than as a person ("Of all the things I've washed..."). But for these two, a crack is starting to spread in the glass. Oof. Metaphors were never my strength.

Forgot to mention an important part: Hideko's aunt—Kouzuki's wife—is dead, purportedly by suicide. She is said to have hanged herself from a large cherry tree within view of the manor house. Indeed, as Hideko leaves once and for all with Sook-hee to elope with the Count, they make their way across the grounds of her uncle's estate, a noose swaying from one of the tree's branches in the foreground. More like 'in the foreshadowing', amirite? Interestingly, Sook-hee tells Hideko that her own mother hanged herself...and then she giggles about it. The hell? Turns out her mother was caught stealing and was actually hanged as a punishment. "Did she cry? She laughed!" Sook-hee laughs to cover pain, too, it seems.

Hideko's aunt was one of the few people who was kind to her as she grew up, and there are a lot of parallels between them. "Did the big house make her go mad?" Mmmm, in a way, yes. The idea of insanity is toyed around with in this film in each act. Sook-hee, still conspiring with the Count to have Hideko committed after their honeymoon, fears that the poor girl "might truly go mad." Given the life that Hideko goes through, I don't see how she wouldn't lose her mind. Even as a young girl coming into womanhood under her uncle's thumb she realizes that "I was going a bit crazy," so she decided to do what she could to make those around her go crazy, too. Fair do's, kid.

Here we see Hideko and Sook-hee bonding over a book bath. Did you think that I was joking about the movable floorboards? I wouldn't deceive you like that. The snake statue is real, too. Anyway, I want to talk more about the relationship between these characters. Hideko is repressed ("He won't permit it," "He makes me," et cetera). She also has some trust issues which, holy hell, she fucking should. Everyone she has ever been exposed to betrays her in some way or another, so she tells Sook-hee outright that she can curse and steal but that she should never, ever lie. Uh, about that... ^^; Duplicity is featured quite a bit throughout this story. Hideko is no saint herself; she feels "dead inside," and I cannot help but view her as a sort of mimic who steals other people's words and adopts their behaviors because she has no inner identity of her own. During one of her forced BDSM shit-shows, she is even bound like a puppet attached to strings pulled by her increasingly-creepy uncle.

Don't look too closely at what's inside the glass jars. If you think Uncle is terrible toward children and women, just imagine what he is going to do to Fujiwara when he learns of his con. Anyway, this is officially a Park Chan-wook appreciation post, so check out that sick framing. Unf.

Another sexy shot. And...a happily ever after? Well, I doubt it given the tumultuous time in which the story is set, but the sense of closure is solid. That's more than can be said about this post. Yeesh.

Happy new decade, everybody.

Send help.

For more information:

• The Handmaiden on IMDb

Story Threads: See You Up There

Eeeeeeh I'm back! It's been another year since the last post, so at least I am consistent with being late. Quick catch-up: I'm now married, will be working as a full-time reference librarian come the new year, and still love films. My writing is out of practice...bear with me, if you will. But hey, I changed the color theme on the blog, so at least that's somethin'.

"It's a long story. It's complicated."

—Albert Maillard

We've all heard the metaphor of a story being like a tapestry woven from many different threads. They come together to form a beautiful work of art, everything connected, each individual strand easy enough to follow when scrutinized independent of the others. The best works hold up when taken in from both vantages. Storytellers can create some masterfully complex tales, but at times I feel like they push the needle in the wrong direction. Sometimes a handful of threads—of connections—are forced for the sake of completing rather than complementing the whole. See You Up There is not alone in that regard, but it is regrettable all the same.

Rated 'tous publics'.
For those of us who did not take two years of French in high school,
just know that there's a teeny bit of nudity, war violence & injuries,
swearing, and a dude breathing into the maw of a freshly dead horse.

I still really enjoyed Au revoir là-haut; I decided to watch it in the first place because the trailer looked whimsical and gritty. I like whimsy! And grittiness! The film came out in France in 2017 and was nominated for/won a bunch of awards shortly thereafter. Based on a novel of the same name by Pierre Lamaitre and adapted/directed by Albert Dupontel (who also plays narrator and main character Maillard), this film is even lauded by the most critical of critics: Rotten Tomatoes.

A rundown of the plot: November 9th, 1918. War-glutton and très villainous Pradelle damns his battalion by sending them to their slaughter one day before armistice. During the battle, Edouard Péricourt (played by the very talented Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) saves Maillard from his premature burial only to be injured himself. Maillard, in turn, saves Edouard, only Edouard is horribly disfigured and wants to die. Not wanting to face his estranged family, he begs his newfound friend to remove his war record, thereby faking his death. Maillard obliges and sends Edouard off to a fancy hospital in Paris to get a prosthetic jaw, only the pretty boy is too good for that and decides to live as a half-faced freak instead. Fair do's. Maillard has some stuff to deal with on his own, mainly the fact that he saw Pradelle shoot two of their own back on the battlefield. What's worse, Pradelle KNOWS that Maillard knows, so when Edouard's loving sister Madeleine shows up to claim her brother's corpse, the two strike a deal to cover each other's asses in exchange for not ratting the other out.

A year goes by. Down-on-his-luck Maillard has come back to Paris and is taking care of Edouard, the mighty morphine addict who decides to wallow in self-pity while Maillard works a shitty job and steals drugs from disabled veterans in the name of friendship. They eventually decide to con the state—currently high on hero worship—into paying for elaborate cenotaphs which they never intend to build. See, Edouard is an amazing artist who hates his coldhearted father Marcel for pushing him into joining the war rather than into pursuing the life that he once wanted. Since both ex-soldiers are bitter about what they went through, the qualms about the con are few.

Also, Edouard wears masks now. Pfft, arty types.

Meanwhile, Pradelle is making money off of the improper burials of his fellow fallen soldiers. He is also connected to Edouard's father...precisely how is never made clear, but daddy Péricourt is rich and powerful and perturbed by his son's apparent death as well as their missed opportunity for reconciliation. Maillard, having lied to the Péricourt family about his friend's supposed death, again meets with Madeleine who, as it turns out, has married Pradelle. Whaaat. Edouard eventually finds out about this, falls deeper into depression, and takes his revenge on Pradelle by sending a state inspector after his macabre business. Maillard takes a job as a bookkeeper for Marcel and begins to steal money from the profiteers at his bank. Oh, also, in what I assume was an attempt to honor his late son, Marcel throws a contest to design a massive memorial with a grand prize of one hundred fifty thousand francs. Lo and behold, Edouard wins this competition under a false name, but Marcel is suspicious since lil' ol' Eddie still uses his original signature on all of his work. D'oh!

For glory?

There's a subplot with an orphan girl who becomes close to Edouard, another with a love interest for Maillard, but the main ending is as follows: Madeleine only married Pradelle to be with child and soon dumps his cheating ass (as if he weren't bad enough, the prick sleeps around). Maillard confesses his con to his rando lady-love then goes a bit nuts and 'accidentally' kills Pradelle by burying him alive with a horse mask (extreme irony, believe me). Marcel tracks down the artist who has conned so many as well as taken the prize money, realizes it is his son, and has a cathartic dialog with him. Edouard is pretty much out of his mind on morphine at this point but hugs his father before jumping off a building to his death. There is a 'second ending', which was dumb in that it tried to tie up loose ends by forcing events to come full circle, and unfortunately that is what left the largest impression on my mind. The threads of this story came together in too many ways. They got tangled up, and the tapestry wasn't ruined so much as made messier.

There are plenty of other things that this movie did really well, though. The idea that the fates of so many rest on the shoulders on a handful of influential idiots is as relevant now as it was during WWI. Maillard reasons that he did not speak up against Pradelle simply by shrugging and saying "Orders are orders," a mindset that has plagued many jingoistic nations throughout history. Even after all that he went through, he still had to refer to Pradelle as 'sir' for propriety's sake. It is this lack of willingness to go against the grain that spurs Maillard's decision to go off the deep end so wholeheartedly and take part in Edouard's plans. His actions are almost understandable with this in mind. After all, he openly admits, "All war taught me was to fight innocent men. So I did just that." The audience is all but cajoled into taking his side, too, given that his nemesis is such a scoundrel. I mean...early on, Pradelle skips across the graves of his comrades so as not to muddy his shoes (in a very literal sense).

What a wanker.

Similarly, the ever-present 'make art, not war' motto present throughout the film stuck some cords. For one, Edouard literally spoke through his art, although what he had to say was somewhat duplicitous. At times it was startlingly on point ('Vive la mort!), but when it came to his con, each memorial's patriotic title—from 'The Grateful Nation' and 'Joy in Battle' to 'Thanks for Everything' and 'Proud to Die'—followed quickly by a price tag and his own chortling made it obvious that his creations were a complete farce. They still fooled pretty much everybody, though, which is the point. "Publicity for death," as Edouard would say. These characters are bitter, and a touch mad, and it shows. For instance, when Madeleine comes to invite Maillard to a family dinner and share memories of Edouard, she states simply, "You were with my brother when he died." Edouard, not knowing that she is right outside his abode, has a laughing fit with the orphan girl Louise. The action is absurd given the circumstances, and even Maillard is aghast as he tries to provide the appropriate cover to the unknowing Madeleine. It's those subtleties which give me life, not the big signposts displaying the words 'See? Look here! Isn't what we did clever?' that make up the vast majority of this story.

I legit love these two, tho. <3

So, did I like this film despite its unnecessary complexities? Yeah, actually, a lot. The 'whimsy' I wrote of earlier is very French in nature and reminded me of Amélie and Mood Indigo, at least with the cinematography and aesthetics if not exactly story-wise. I especially like Edouard's friendship with Louise and how it illuminates the large part of him that never grew up. She accepts him with innocence, but of course things are never that simple. Edouard is a complex creature, one who decries his father's lifestyle yet thrives only on opulence. At one point he makes a mask out of paper bills, and his final visage is that of a peacock. You can draw your own conclusions about that symbolism.

An artist with his head in the clouds, or just a wasteful fop? You decide!

Maillard recognizes this trait in his friend but takes it in stride. "I told Edouard I had a job. He didn't ask where. Rich people think others ought to work." It seems that only the rich can afford to be whimsical, eh? Edouard has no idea—or, more likely, does not care to understand—what is involved to keep his lifestyle going. He came up with the grand plan, but like so many geniuses he does not care about the smaller details. Maillard's job enables them to run their con by obtaining the funds to print up catalogs, open bank accounts under false names without raising suspicion, make large withdrawals of cash, etc. Edouard takes everything for granted. It is also his hubris as an artist that tips off his father about the identify of the man behind the mask. His sister Madeleine acts similarly, using Pradelle as it suits her only to toss him aside when she is done with him...although the asshole absolutely deserved it, no doubt about that. See You Up There raises these issues of classism, at two points giving the audience a glimpse of the upstairs v. downstairs mentality that so permeated the era during which the story takes place (Marcel talking down to Maillard on the landing as he offers him a job, Padelle smoking halfway down the same stairway after he is left low by Madeleine's harsh but true words). This was overt, and even though the audience does not have to dig deeply to understand what is being said, the message itself is fairly timeless.

I was never any good at writing conclusions. Ta-da! Le fin. See you next year, maybe. ;)

For further information:

• See You Up There on IMDb