Architecture, Freedom and the Troubling Implications of Looking in The Handmaiden
Words by Matilda Mendick
The Handmaiden is all about looking, and Park Chan-wook takes care to distinguish the different implications of the act of looking throughout his film. He shows us stolen glances between lovers, the perversions of the male gaze, and even troubles our understanding of what we see as viewers by providing new contexts and perspectives to recurring scenes. Whilst the film tells the story of its two central lovers, and explores wider motifs of gender based oppression and liberation, the one implication of looking that he fails to fully consider is his own as director.
Park Chan-wook’s 2016 feature is a slick and psychological erotic thriller that centres on two female protagonists and dwells heavily on their subjugation and eventual liberation in its themes and visual motifs. Told in three parts and from three different perspectives, the viewer learns more about the central push and pull between the characters as The Handmaiden’s plot unravels.
Sook-hee and Lady Hideko, the film’s lovers, are each searching for an escape from their circumstances and both initially try to find it through scheming with the grifter referred in the film as The Count, although his real name and social status are conspicuously unclear. The Count is one of two main antagonists in the film, the other is Hideko’s uncle Kouzuki, and much of the action of the film takes place under his roof.
The architecture of Kouzuki’s house visualises the control that he exerts over his niece and also serves to function as a motif of oppression more generally. The home incorporates both Western and Japanese architectural styles, and as the film is set in 1930s Korea, a period when the country was under Japanese colonial rule, the presence of the oppressor is made thematically clear. When Sook-hee first arrives at the house the camera follows her from afar as she walks along the corridor of the Japanese wing. This part of the house contains Kouzuki’s library, and the camera stays at a distance as the characters walk past, drawing our attention to the sheer scale of the home.
“I wouldn’t exactly call The Handmaiden a culmination, but it’s a movie where I pushed the feminist perspective the most.”
Our first introduction to the house also carries symbolism for the layers of the story, as viewers we don't yet know that the real nature of Kouzuki’s treatment of his niece is still obscure to both Sook-hee and us as viewers. When Sook-hee first attempts to enter the library she is shut out with the aid of a mechanical gate and a phallic sculpture of a snake, unsubtly placed at its entrance. Kouzuki is constantly behind the scenes, at a distance which imbues him with a disturbing amount of power, and his controlling nature is only revealed to the audience once we enter his library in the second part of the film.
It is here where Park switches his camera’s perspective from that of Sook-hee to Hideko, retelling many of the events the audience has already seen from her point of view and revealing the abuse that she has suffered at the hands of Kouzuki. Hideko has been forced to read sadistic and erotic texts to crowds of men from a young age and we now become privy to a number of her readings in the room at the heart of the library. Covered in tatami mats, the space is transformed to create a stage and seating for Kouzuki’s invitees. This room functions as a microcosm of his control, his own world that he can orchestrate and reshape to his liking. As Hideko performs for her uncle and his friends in the library, Park does not focus on the contents of her performance and instead redirects his attention towards the men as they watch her. These men, all dressed in tuxedos, stare at Hideko as the camera either pans over them or confronts them head-on in a wide shot.
Park is challenging us as viewers, drawing our attention to the perversions of our own patriarchal gaze as we watch the men turn Hideko into a sexualised object (this is made even more explicit in the scene in which she performs with a wooden, life-size puppet). Much of the plot of the film, especially in the final part, centres on the way in which Hideko separates herself from her uncle with the help of her lover Sook-hee.
In this final part, the perspective changes again to one that is seemingly more objective, as we watch Hideko and Sook-hee admit their love for each other and get revenge. Here we find two powerful scenes that Park uses to explicitly demonstrate how the women liberate themselves. In this final part, the perspective changes again to one that is seemingly more objective as we watch Hideko and Sook-hee admit their love for each other and get revenge on Kouzuki and the Count. Here, we find two powerful scenes that Park uses to explicitly demonstrate how the women liberate themselves.
Before escaping to Shanghai, Hideko and Sook-hee destroy Kouzuki’s library, which Park has described in a 2016 interview as a scene depicting two women as they dismantle a patriarchal system. Park lingers on the moment, as wordlessly Sook-hee and then Hideko move the tatami mats and submerge many of the books in the water underneath, now moulding the world as their own.
The following sequence, in which the women jump over the short wall and out of the limits of the house is a poignant continuation of this theme. Although the wall is short, Hideko needs the help of Sook-hee to cross the threshold, demonstrating the extent of the psychological impact of her uncle’s abuse. As the women escape they manage to double-cross the Count, and he and Kouzuki both die from toxic mercury gas in the basement of the house. This part of the film is the point at which the feminist undercurrents are at their strongest, and yet the final shot of the film is where its themes and visual language clash.
Although the conclusion of the film builds towards the liberation of the lead characters from explicitly oppressive patriarchal control, the final moments of the film seem to undo, or at least complicate this liberation: situating the women, consciously or not, within the position of the male gaze. Park's own perspective as a male director of a lesbian romance has been called into question since the film’s release, with many detractors critiquing his framing of the two women’s relationship especially in the film’s sex scenes. Having reiterated his position as a feminist in a number of interviews in promotion of the film, it is as though Park Chan-wook is unaware of the implications of how he is presenting his lead characters, and an interesting tension emerges between the themes of oppression and liberation in the narrative and the visual language of the final scene.
“It feels like a fairy-tale world—doesn’t it? With the moon, the ocean, and the clouds, with the colours that I used in the last scene, I wanted to imbue it with that kind of beauty...to end on a note where we’re dreaming about this type of idealised world.”
As the Count and Kouzuki die in the basement, the film ends with a final scene of the two women having sex, recreating one of the pornographic stories that Hideko was forced to read to the male spectators. This scene has drawn controversy from critics who denounce Park’s portrayal of lesbian sex scenes. This recreated story is identical to one that provoked feelings of desire in Hideko earlier in the film. Here in the final scene, she finally gives in to that desire, seemingly liberated without the presence of men. Yet the film’s framing is at odds with this message.
Park’s wide shot, which positions the actresses' bodies on full display, resembles the framing of the stage in Kouzuki’s library. Again, as spectators, this shot makes us feel complicit and aligns us with the perverted gaze of Kouzuki and the Count as it is decidedly voyeuristic, but the implications of this image are complicated. If we, as the viewers, still continue to see these women through a similar lens despite their liberation have they really escaped? And doesn’t this curb the happy ending that they were supposedly given?
This sequence seems to betray the limits of Park’s own gaze as a male director. In an interview for Film Comment with Goran Topalovic, he describes The Handmaiden as the film of his in which he “pushed the feminist perspective the most” and that it’s a film that “pits man against woman” where the “only cool characters are the women” and the men are “pathetic” villains. In relation to the film’s ending, he considers how the final sequence feels like a fairy tale and tells Topalovic that ‘“[he] wanted to end on a note where we’re dreaming about this type of idealised world”. This comment is eerily reflective of how he depicts Kouzuki’s approach to his library as his own idealised world—with Park as the orchestrator here. Advertently or inadvertently, he is revealing the troubling implications of looking as a spectator: is the women’s freedom truly realised if we are still watching them?
