Since this has gotten a US limited release, I think it deserves its own topic. If you happened to read my self-indulgent fantastic fest thread all the way through, you’ll know it’s the only movie I saw twice. It is hands down my favourite movie of the year.
Here’s a trailer that gives very little away:
If you like the way Park Chan-wook does movies, this among his best stuff. I’m pretty sure you’ll love this. This is Oldboy level craft. Basically, just go see it.
If you need more, well…it’s based on Sarah Waters novel Fingersmith, transplanted into Japanese occupied Korea. Sook-Hee, a pickpocket gets sent to be a handmaiden for a Japanese noblewoman as part of an elaborate con. Then stuff gets…complicated.
Look, it’s a con movie. You don’t want to know too much of the plot.
Also, it’s pretty long. Some people will have a probem with that, but aside from maybe one specific scene I’d have cut differently, I want to be there for every minute.
And as that trailer should have hinted at, it is sexy. And perverted. Unless you’re super comfortable around each other about sex, this is probably not the thing to go see for a parent-child cinema outing. It feels like it’s some very sly framing away from an NC-17 rating. (Although it’s not both at the same time – the skeeviest stuff is not visually explicit at all, but this is threading on spoiler territory.)
I’m kind of freaked out by your reaction to this movie, Soren.
I had a hard time sitting through this movie. There are so many things I liked about it, and so many things that made me roll my eyes. Things I found compelling, and then things I found tiresome. I like the ideas and what it is reaching for, but I’m not sure I’m on board with the execution.
Maybe that’s because I don’t always like the way—
…hold on. I’m going to ask something completely dumb and I apologize. I keep trying to write about this and look up facts about it, and I see the way you write his name, that is Park Chan-wook, which is how you see his name when you google the movie, but then you go to IMDb and it’s Chan-wook Park. I’m sorry for being dumb about this, but it’s frustrating talking about the movie when you can’t confidently name the director…
—does movies, as you put it. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
We’re super early in the thread, so I don’t want to do spoilers yet either. Let me just bullet a couple of points.
I had a really hard time getting a hold of the tone of this movie. The music started giving me a Carter Burwell vibe early on, which was weird because I couldn’t put my finger on that either for a time. It was like an itch I couldn’t scratch until I landed on it. Then the weird humor and a lot of the camera work reminded me of the Coen Brothers as well (especially of their Sonnenfeld days). Which was totally weird and I thought often not appropriate for the tone of the given scene.
It’s way too long for me, though I get why it’s way too long. You kind of allude to this above. I do get what he’s going for, but by the time I get that, I don’t think that’s enough to reverse that sensation.
I do like where it goes. For the most part. But I think it will betray some of its audience as it does so. That is to say, I think audience attrition is going to be a major issue with this movie.
I find the original title, as opposed to this title, to be a fascinating change. And weird.
I don’t think it’s as sexy as it thinks it is. Or rather, I think it knows this and is doing it on purpose, and, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think it is fooling some people into thinking it’s a sexier movie than it actually is. And, again, this is what I mean above when I think it’s fucking with its audience.
All that said, I was super delighted to see you post a thread about it, having just seen it myself.
You know, your reaction makes me feel pretty vindicated – if you go back to the fantastic fest thread, you’ll notice it’s conspicuously absent from my list of recommendations to you. I love the way he plays with tone, but I could just see you sitting there with your arms crossed at it for precisely that reason.
Re: the name, I’m being a hipster and writing it the eastern way, the family name first. Chan-wook Park is the western way.
As for the sexiness, I think he keeps the sex scenes kind of playful and grounded in characaters discovering themselves, which makes it feel less salacious. The bath scene is actually the sexiest scene in the movie for me. (And damn, that is one hell of a scene.)
But you know, it’s still two women full-on sixty-nining each other on the big screen. It deserved a warning so you know what you’re in for if you decide to take your parent/kid to the movies.
My arms weren’t crossed so much as my brow was furrowed. I’m fine with tonal shifts, I just didn’t get what he was doing here for too long, which made me feel more jerked around than curious. Regardless, I suppose you’re right to feel vindicated. Which is to say, I appreciate you taking me seriously in my request for your recommendations in the Fantastic Fest thread. I mean that. As I’m sure you know.
I also appreciate your use of the word ‘salacious’ above in making a distinction between the depiction of sex and sexiness. While a couple of scenes in this movie made me catch my breath–including the bath scene, as you rightly highlight–much of the actual sex and sexual content can hardly be described as sexy. Which is the point, most of the time, and is also a way of messing with the audience.
As is the cephalopod callback. Which I found obvious. If not…distasteful.
Amazon recently added this to Prime video and I would strongly recommend watching this to most film buffs.
I went in almost completely cold - only knew it was from the director of Oldboy (which I haven’t even seen) - and I was immediately taken in by the gorgeously shot film. I’m a huge sucker for this kind of movie and was fully hooked when ‘Part Two’ started. However, I will say that ‘Part Three’ was a bit of a let-down, but probably only because of the fantastic slow burns of Parts One & Two.
Also, I totally agree that the first bath scene - the teeth cleaning one - was much more erotic than any of the actual sex scenes in the final act. Those teetered into Bound territory - which is its own kind of sexy but loses a lot in the context of this particular story and the ‘stories’ that it relates. Nice tweaking of the audience by the director.
[quote=“Kemper_Boyd, post:7, topic:126707”]
I went in almost completely cold - only knew it was from the director of Oldboy (which I haven’t even seen)[/quote]
Dude, sort that out. All of Park’s stuff is worth watching, but especially Oldboy.
I’m not a movie guy but I enjoyed how Park refined and improved upon the original Sarah Waters version. Spoilers below:
[spoiler]The original book was more serialized and “BBC”-ified in pacing and seemed to have been aimed at the small screen, with more arbitrary twists; and in fact the book really was adapted into a BBC miniseries a couple years after publication.
(For the purposes of the spoilers I’ll call the characters by their position to keep it clear between versions). In the original, The Maid actually was the rich heiress and The Niece never conspired with her to double cross The Gentleman because something something switched at birth. So the second and third parts in the original are more muddled with unexpected twists out of left field more than once. The Gentleman eventually gets stabbed by The Maid when she confronts and intends to kill The Niece. In this respect it’s also less romantic in that the original version seems to have their eventual reconciliation much more dubious, as if Waters couldn’t quite bring herself to see the two overcoming the simultaneous double cross. She also muddies the waters, I think, by having The Niece in the end supporting herself by writing erotic fiction which makes the whole abusive uncle situation much less clear; is she saying eroticism is good as long as there is agency? It wasn’t the content of the books but the circumstances The Uncle imposed upon The Niece in reading them?
Park cleans all this up I think and makes their relationship much more romantic, makes the uncle’s perverse hobbies much more unambiguously perverse and rejected by the protagonists (the women actually destroy many of his books before leaving), splits the three parts into who apparently is double crossing who, which after the hanging tree scene the audience is rooting for the women to pull one over on The Gentleman, and then sets the perverse civilizing refinements of the Uncle and Gentleman directly analogous to the Japanese occupation of Korea, yet then has the women, one Japanese and one Korean, reject all that nationalistic nonsense and run off together (to China, as it turns out). I also loved the subtle details of their interactions and seeing the scenes from different points of view. I liked how The Gentleman’s last thoughts were on how they pulled it off and he finally picked up on the subtle signs he should have noticed being the con artist himself… but too late[/spoiler]
Holy crow, did I love this movie! I just watched it this morning. For some reason, I had it filed away in my head as a Kim Ki-duk movie (who did 3-Iron, which is great, but also The Bow and Samaritan Girl, which are very hard to watch).
Park Chan-wook is a remarkably talented director, and here he is at the top of his game. His confidence and vision are breathtaking.
What I loved most about this is that going into Part 2, as we realize we (in the audience) have been tricked, is that we keep revisiting the hanging threads left from Part 1 and learn that they are all important to the tale. Such a delicate balance to keep! They show each of those things, the heavy bells, the rope hanging from the tree, Hideko being just a little too “experienced”, the question of why the readings are so hard for her… Each is laid out enough to make it show up as a question in your head, but not so pointed at so dramatically that you feel like the story is missing something for not addressing them. You think, “this is one of those dramas of manners, kept below the surface (and off camera) out of some notion of stiff-upper-lip.” Then, Part 2 gets going and you see these threads all coming back.
