In another time and place: The Handmaiden as an adaptation

ABSTRACT

This article considers the South Korean auteur director Park Chan-wook’s latest film The Handmaiden, which is the film adaptation of British writer Sarah Waters’s third novel Fingersmith. Transporting the story of love and deception from Victorian England to 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule, the film offers a compelling case of transnational or cross-cultural adaptation. In the process of cultural relocation, the film gives prominence to the ethnic identities and hierarchies in colonial Korea, and in recounting the unfolding lesbian love story between a petty-thief-disguised-as-maid and a noble lady, the film provides a spectacular, visual ‘translation’ of the novel’s approach to the story of same-sex desire. Despite all the changes the film makes to the original novel, the author Waters claims that the film is ‘faithful’ to her work. Taking her comments as a framework, the article explores the ways in which the film carries over the transgressive allure of the original story, while addressing the issues of history and identity in another time and place.

KEYWORDS:

• The Handmaiden
• transnational adaptation
• Park Chan-wook
• Sarah Waters
• Fingersmith

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Chi-Yun Shin is a Principal Lecturer in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. She is co-editor of New Korean Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) with Julian Stringer and East Asian Film Noir: Transnational Encounters and Intercultural Dialogue (I.B.Tauris, 2015) with Mark Gallagher. She has also published a range of articles on contemporary East Asian cinema and black Diaspora in Britain in various journals and anthologies.

ORCID

Chi-Yun Shin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0629-6928

Notes

1. The Korean title of the film Ah-ga-ssi / 아가씨 translates as ‘Lady’ or ‘Miss’. English title The Handmaiden counterbalances its Korean title as well as underlining the fact that the two characters are equal. Interestingly, it was released in France under the title of Mademoiselle.

2. Gant points out other factors that helped the surprising success of The Handmaiden in the UK such as the BFI Distribution Fund, which contributed £150,000 to release costs and the immersive film event organizer Secret Cinema. For more details, see Gant’s Sight & Sound report (2017, 9).

3. Fingersmith especially shares kinship with Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), in which a young drawing master is drawn into a conspiracy when he is hired to tutor two women (half-sisters) who live in a country house, owned by their hypochondriac uncle who lives mostly in his library. The novel is widely considered to be one of the first mystery novels as well as a first in the genre of ‘sensation’ novel.

4. For instance, her 2006 The Night Watch is set in post-war Britain, while the 2014 novel The Paying Guests has the 1920s as its backdrop.

5. Sarah Waters attended the film’s Gala screening during the 60th BFI London Film Festival at Embankment Garden Cinema on 7 October 2016, and photographed with the director Park Chan-wook.

6. Incidentally, Park’s screenplay is co-written with his long-time collaborator (since Lady Vengeance, 2005) Chung Seo-kyung, a woman writer, the fact that is often overlooked.

7. It is apparently Syd Lim’s wife who read Fingersmith and thought that it would make for a great movie. See Topalovic (2016).

8. In The Film Programme (Stock 2017), Waters describes the TV miniseries as ‘done in the tradition of good-quality BBC TV adaptation with high-production values with great acting.’

9. The hybrid character of the mansion’s exterior was achieved through CGI (computer generated imagery) by a Korean visual effects studio 4th Creative Party that previously worked for many notable Korean features, including Park’s Oldboy. The film’s production designer Ryu Seong-hee won the Vulcan Award of the Technical Artist at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival for her art direction.

10. For the Japanese audiences, the Korean cast’s apparent struggle to deliver sophisticated old-world Japanese dialogue reportedly hampered the enjoyment of viewing. Reviewing for The Japan Times, James Hadfield, for instance, advises that ‘viewers who wince at clumsy Japanese dialogue may want to give this a miss’ (1 March 2017).

11. In Korean: ‘우리 이즈미 히데코 아가씨로 말씀드릴것 같으면, 그분은 처음부터 그냥 나쁜 년이다.’