If Martin Scorsese had stopped making films after the 90s, he’d still prove an invaluable part of cinema history on the basis of his current film preservation efforts. Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, which works to “help developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures,” has gone a long way in preserving and promoting little seen, almost lost films from a wide range of countries. Since 2007, the World Cinema Foundation has been involved in the restoration of a select handful of films for special screening at the Cannes International Film Festival. The 2008 edition of the series saw the restoration of Kim Ki-young‘s The Housemaid (하녀/Hanyeo, 1960), a landmark in Korean cinema. The Korean Film Archive, which was largely responsible for initiating and completing the restoration of The Housemaid, has gone ahead and restored 4 other films by Kim Ki-young in a special DVD boxset, the Kim Ki-Young Collection.
Kim’s comeback as a major auteur of world cinema began in earnest in 1996 when the Tokyo International Film Festival screened 5 of his films for the first time in many years. Retrospectives at the Busan International Film Festival in 1997 and at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1998 followed suit. When Berlin invited Kim to attend the retrospective, the director was already utilizing his newfound fame to prepare for a new film which would serve as the culmination of a career criminally under-appreciated for decades. Sadly that film never materialized, since Kim and his wife Kim Yu-bong (his long-standing supporter and producer of almost all of his films) died in a fire at their home before they could ever board the plane to Berlin. Fortunately for the world, Kim’s legacy lives on in the efforts of joint ventures like the World Cinema Foundation and the Korean Film Archive.
I recently had the opportunity to watch Kim’s The Housemaid at the Korean Film Archive’s location in Seoul; but the film is available to be watched for free nearly anywhere in the world, thanks to the online film service Mubi.com (formerly known as TheAuteurs.com). If you become a member of the site, you gain access to a sizable selection of well-established auteur films, including Kim’s The Housemaid (though only a handful are free — specifically those restored by the World Cinema Foundation — most films are available for immediate streaming for $3 or less).
Original 1960 film poster
The Housemaid is the right place to start, both historically and aesthetically, for any serious appraisal of the Korean master’s overall work. Released in 1960, Hanyeo was a revolutionary film, in terms of content and style, since it was the first cinematic rupture made by an artist willing to break free from conventional trends and push forward a still nascent Korean film economy. At a time when realist films were in vogue in a country fighting to regroup itself socially and economically after the traumas of the Korean War, the expressionism and sexual violence of The Housemaid appeared lurid and surreal in contrast. Seen even today, the film startles with its portrayal of raw sexuality and its willingness to expose domestic social mores via acute psycho-horror. The premise starts out innocently enough: a music teacher who works at an all-girls school makes ends meet by teaching after-school piano lessons to support his pregnant wife and their two children. Things have gone fiscally well for the growing family, so the teacher invests in his wife’s desire to augment their small home by adding a second floor; the two floors are joined by a stairwell which soon will metamorphose into a structural symbol for the infernal events that will take place. With a larger home and a third child on the way, the wife asks her husband to hire a housemaid to assist her in domestic duties.
A family enjoying an intial moment of happiness
The young woman who eventually takes the role we quickly learn is a deceptively crude girl with a venomous agenda. For one thing, she finds a way to seduce the piano teacher, a morally upright man who’s already driven away other young ladies who dared to confess a secret love for him. We learn later that the young mistress, whose background remains a mystery to us since she literally emerges in her first scene from a dark closet smoking a cigarette (a sign of miscreancy, considering the taboo back then of seeing a woman smoking), secretly desires to take over the household, out of deranged jealousy and bitterness for the happy togetherness of the family, particularly for that of the wife’s possession of her husband and children. Kim quickly delineates his favored subject, which he will exploit throughout his career: the age-old conflict of the sexes, and the role that sexuality plays in uncovering and undermining our (false) social aspirations.
When asked who his intended audience was, Kim answered that he made his films for women. In a Twitch review of the DVD release of The Housemaid, Jon Pais points out that Kim’s response can be ascribed to the fact that the majority of filmgoers during that period were indeed women, housewives who stayed at home and found their precious limited time away from endless domestic work best rewarded by covert trips to the matinee (if they were not already entering the burgeoning workforce at the bottom rung). The Housemaid directly speaks to these women as a testament to their familial and domestic struggles (they were in this respect a political invisibility, locked away in the ‘trifles’ of cooking and cleaning, or hidden in the back kitchens of restaurants) but also as a horrific but stylistically authentic rendition of the primitive irresistible power they wield on the male order. The Housemaid superbly demonstrates these two sides of the female psyche (as Kim views them): on the one hand there is the domestic nurturing motherly quality evinced in the piano teacher’s wife, who is not only the most forgiving and strongest of the characters in the film, but the real link of stability and hard work that keeps the family together; on the other hand, the housemaid embodies the spiteful, retributive, primeval sexual force that, if such a brutalism of ‘woman’ does not really exist in any normative sense, does exist in the man’s psyche as the foremost awe-inducing power to which he is helpless to obey. In Kim’s imagination, men are made for women to use and throw away, hardly ever the other way around.
Temptation inside the housemaid's room
But what makes the film so blisteringly original is its refusal to sympathize readily with any of the characters: in the end we find none of them truly likable, and the happy-together family turns out to be as decrepit, miserable, and wrathful as the housemaid herself. We may find ourselves equally in sympathy for her misery as for the family’s misfortune in abetting it: they are all the victims of a greater hidden social order (of the cant and gossip which control and destroy lives on the brink of ‘respectability’) that fearfully imprisons them in a hell of their involuntary making. The children, we find, are not endearing or saccharine, they are callous and spiteful; the charitable law-abiding wife is also a woman whose pride overrides her ability to have any transcendent compassion for the housemaid’s onerous plight or even to be rid of her at the risk of scandal; and the morally upright husband turns out to be a feeble cowardly husk of a man.
Most importantly The Housemaid is a cinematographic tour-de-force that gathers its power through a decisive geometry of its interior world. Kim, who constructed the film set himself (he had prior training as a set designer for theater productions), uses his pliable serpentine camera to invade the nooks and crannies of the two-floor family home — we are able to see from inside cupboards, floating outside 2nd floor rooms, crawling on the floor or peeping through closed doors — thus designating the home to be as worthy of character excavation as the human personae who inhabit its chambers. I mentioned that the stairwell in the film becomes a crucial symbol; it is the site of the film’s intensely tormented climax, but the stairwell is first described practically as the way up to the new floor which houses the piano study where the husband conducts his music lessons or involves his private thoughts, or where the family gets together on leisure days; and the stairs are also the way up, on the right side, to the small room where the housemaid sleeps. Her chamber is connected by a hallway and an outside terrace to the piano study, and this part of the set-design is where Kim’s mastery of cinematic space most aptly reveals itself: during the “seduction” scene, Kim uses a camera rail to track the housemaid’s surreptitious prowl on the outside terrace connecting her room to the piano study. The interiors of both rooms are viewable to us because no curtains shade the large-paned windows that frame the action in the housemaid’s bedroom and in the piano study; the camera glides effortlessly from her room to the piano study and back, and a double mirroring effect is produced.
Prior to the seduction scene, the housemaid spies on the music teacher inside the piano study giving a lesson to a female pupil; the housemaid’s eyes, as she looks in from outside, become our eyes, but when the camera shifts inside to the dramatic action involving the piano teacher’s perspective, we lose consciousness of the housemaid, and are alarmed to find her waiting outside like a succubus waiting to creep in. In short, the exterior perspective (the housemaid’s: as demon, social outcast) ends up being merged with the interior perspective (the piano teacher’s: as moral man, social cog): this union of the interior and exterior zones, of the piano teacher and the housemaid conjoined by circumstance into an awful embrace of lust, wrecks havoc on the flimsy moral order of the family home. The stairwell which connects the family rooms quartered on the first floor to the piano and housemaid chambers above, transforms into a bridge that subverts the traditional view of heaven as above and of hell below, by placing the site of socially-contracted domestic love beneath that of the illicit hellish sex that takes place directly above it. When we see the broken husband slinking up the stairwell like a whipped dog to its master, the stairs which had once signified the family’s good welfare and advancement in the world now connotes a psycho-social slavery to adulterous sin and the shame of hypocrisy and guilt.
The Housemaid‘s resurgence as a classic of world cinema has already inspired a remake by a contemporary Korean director (and self-described acolyte of Kim Ki-young), Im Sang-soo. Im is known for controversial and erotically charged films like The President’s Last Bang (2005) and A Good Lawyer’s Wife (2003), so his decision to reintroduce the raw sexuality on display in The Housemaid seemed only superficially worthwhile. The remake, also titled Hanyeo (2010), was released only two weeks ago in South Korea, and it is likely to be available on DVD in the United States later this year. On the surface, it is a competent film that will attract some attention, since it boasts a lead performance by Jeon Do-yeon, winner of the Cannes Best Actress Award in 2008 for Lee Chang-dong’s Milyang (released in the U.S. as Secret Sunshine). Jeon, an expert actress, plays the housemaid character to the best of her abilities (such as they were conducted by Director Im), except now the visceral qualities which made the original film a thunderous experience are now achingly trivialized and, worse, aestheticized for aimless effect. The remake is a finely-crafted but hollow shell of the original; Im seems determined to invert nearly every feature which made the original film a psychic experience, rendering the new version a materialistic exposition of non-mental states better off dialogued in the semantics of a Korean television drama.
Despite the remake’s promising beginning sequence, which starts as so many contemporary art films now do, sans credits and wordlessly in media res, carefully observing the vivid outdoor nightlife of the Seoul landscape in shrewd high definition detail — Im unfortunately decides to follow through on his premise of starting from outside and working his way into the story without adhering to Kim’s ingenious structure of directly utilizing the cinematic space of the home as a meta-narrative element. Instead of establishing and developing and characterizing the family home as a psychic feature of the family’s mental state, Im transposes the entire story to a vast and soulless mansion, of which no room or enclosed space seems to hold any definite place in time or reality, much less any trace of personality or decorative effect on its inhabitants. The mansion just comes off over-large, exaggerated, amorphous; if Im’s desire was to make the now ridiculously wealthy family a soulless unit (which they are even when they say nothing, as when they ostentatiously listen to western classical music and listlessly flip through book plates of Matisse), then he has done it with glib aplomb.
The new housemaid meets her employer
Even the social critical element at the heart of the original film is surgically removed: the family is now obscenely wealthy, this time composed of a willfully lecherous wine-gurgling husband, a pregnant vacant-eyed trophy wife, and a young blank-faced daughter who speaks in monotone and shows about as many emotions as her stuffed dolls do. The extra inclusions of an elderly housemaid who, at first anyway, coldly oversees the duties of her understudy, and that of a conniving stepmother who steps in when she learns of the affair, do very little to add to the momentum already lost. With this larger family and a flatulent veneer of wealth overtaking all other sensibilities, the need for them to suffer the presence of the offending housemaid any more than they have to comes across as trite and belabored. And what’s worse, the housemaid, no longer Kim’s vengeful sexually predatory demon, is played by Jeon (who confessed having difficulty understanding Im’s interpretation) as a cow-eyed simpleton who can’t seem to comprehend why anything ever occurs to her, good or bad. Since the housemaid’s sexual witchcraft is now diminished to nothing but a je ne sais quoi insipidity, hence depriving her of any reason to launch any sort of mental warfare on her tormentors, the inevitable “payback” climax results looking frantically underdeveloped and foolish. Addled with a lack of narrative cogency, Im compensates for the absence of structural innovation with the bluster of shiny, moodily lit cinematography, none of which does anything but enhance the sterility of its incidents.
Still from "Hanyeo" 2010
All this said, please watch Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid: there is no telling how long the film will be available for free. A full version of what some consider Kim’s greatest, certainly his most lurid, achievement, Iodo (1970), is available on the web as well (via Dr. Strangefilm).
A trailer for the new film is below:
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