South Korea, 1960
Directed by Kim Ki-young
With Kim Jun-kyu (Kim Dong-sik), Ju Jeung-nyeo (Mrs. Kim), Lee Eun-shim (Myung-sook), Eom Aeng-ran (Cho Kyung-hee), Ko Seon-ae (Kwak Seon-young), Ahn Sung-ki (Kim Chang-soon), Lee Yoo-ri (Kim Ae-soon)
A mundane scene of domestic life: a husband and his wife argue over a newspaper report about a man who fell in love with his maid, causing a scandal, while their two children play cat’s cradle amazingly fast. They are in a cozy room, nicely furnished and decorated, the husband wears fashionable Western clothes while his wife is clad in a beautiful traditional Korean dress and their kids are exuding quietness and gentleness.
But foreigners would upset this picture of tranquility and orderly life. They are the workers of the textile mill employing the husband, Kim Dong-sik, as a music teacher to provide cultural education and entertainment to the workers once their shift is over. One of those workers, Kwak Seon-young, reckons to send Kim Dong-sik a love letter and her best friend Cho Kyung-hee is ready to help her; but things go wrong as the music teacher reports the incident to the management; since rules have been violated, Kwak Seon-young is fired. Cho Kyung-hee then starts to ingratiate herself in the life of Kim Dong-sik, claiming she wants to learn piano while befriending the teacher’s relatives: Mrs. Kim, the wife, Kim Ae-soon, the eldest daughter whose legs are paralyzed, and Kim Chang-soon, the naughty and feisty little son. It is hard to gather what Cho Kyung-hee wants: perhaps to seduce Kim Dong-sik, perhaps to avenge Kwak Seon-young. What she does achieve is to get her roommate Myung-sook hired as a housemaid by the Kims: Mrs. Kim’s hard work allowed them to have enough money to extend their house but that implies more chores than a woman whose health is fragile and who is expecting a baby can handle.
At first glance, Myung-sook is a shy, dim-witted young woman who is slightly clumsy and definitely weird, as suggested by her first action, the vicious killing of a rat carried out with childish enthusiasm and disregard to the comfort of the family members. But she turns out to be an inquisitive and suspicious character, with her strange stares and affected anxiety. Kim Ae-soon and Kim Chang-soon right away distrust her and deal with her with arrogance and disdain. Their father is puzzled but their mother seems to notice nothing odd.
Things take a radical turn when Kim Dong-sik’s wife and children travel to visit relatives. He has already lost his composure and confidence after the sudden death of Kwak Seon-young, a tragedy the mother of the former textile worker clearly puts down on his past behaviors. Now he must face the sexual assault of Myung-sook and he proves unable to withstand it. Kim Dong-sik becomes the reluctant lover of his maid and loses control of the situation when Myung-sook finds out she is pregnant. He tells the truth to his wife who then decides to avoid at any cost a public scandal. She accepts the unlawful relation but sees to it the maid cannot have her baby. When Mrs. Kim delivers her own baby, Myung-sook, still embittered by what her boss has made to her body, becomes more predatory and wicked. She starts an ugly fight to dominate both the husband and the whole family. She deliberately poisons Kim Chang-soon and forces Kim Dong-sik to sleep every night in her room. Kim Ae-soon struggles to stay alive and to defeat the insane maid while Mrs. Kim works harder than ever to inject money in her home and to keep up the appearances. To bring his ordeal to an end, the musician eventually accepts to commit suicide with Myung-sook, a move that, in the housemaid’s view, would unite them in heaven, free from any social constraint.
This a stunning, provocative fall from grace, a remarkable story of a female perversion slowly eroding the self-assurance and tranquility of a couple enjoying the material success brought upon by the building of the new state of South Korea inside the free, capitalist part of the world in the wake of World War Two. The most upsetting element of the narrative lies in the fact nothing hints at the changes the lead characters of the cheating husband and the raunchy housemaid undergo.
By letting Kwak Seon-young down, Kim Dong-sik shows he is a stickler for rules and a faithful husband, even if this righteous attitudes come back later to haunt him, helping to destabilize his psyche. Even when facing Cho Kyung-hee he seems barely apt at cheating on his wife (though he is not insensible to the smart young woman’s charm). But the direct, wild attack of Myung-sook comes as a surprise he cannot cope with: her brutal instinct is stronger than his social skills and moral scruples. He would behave as a stunned, intimated prisoner, his hand famously resting on his closed eyes with the face slightly leaning forward, hanging from despair, unable to imagine a way forward and sheepishly accepting the fact. Even an outburst of rage would not enable him to strangle his nemesis to death – he is an ordinary man turned into a puppet, a victim of sexual drive who would only belatedly remember he has a dignity. The increasingly dizzying nature of a plot setting him in a trap is wonderfully reflected by the smooth, constant use in various places of tracking shots (the camera tracks back, in, or sideways, when it is not zooming) usually highlighting how helpless he is.
Myung-sook first cuts an ineffective and diminutive figure barely eliciting sympathy. At the same time, her first gesture, that dramatic killing of a rat, suggests she is has a predatory nature. Her state of mind may be unstable but she clearly has strong desires. Hers is the story of a barely educated, lower-class person who still knows a few tricks suddenly deciding to get satisfaction – physically and socially. Her increasingly mad and vicious ways look indeed as a struggle to assert her need to get satisfied and to break the social and psychological barriers hindering her. Mrs. Kim’s response to the housemaid’s brutal challenge baffles and shocks. This is not only her cruelty that is impressive – it seems a really wicked but still predictable score-settling – that the ensuing subdued, submissive attitudes that follow. The only rationale she articulates is the fear the hubby could be engulfed in a scandal and lose his job and hence the revenues needed for the house – a huge, nice place whose upkeep called for the hiring of the housemaid. It is hard to find a more scathing attack on the rush for modernity and money that was keeping busy the South Koreans at the time.
The ending comes as a complete surprise – it seems it was an add-on, since it was feared that the grisly deaths of the musician and the housemaid would be too shocking a way to end “Hanyo – The Housemaid”. But on second thoughts, it is clever and unsettling. The film picks up at the point it started, that nice family scene when the husband and the wife started to argue. Now it looks like that the wife has been reading the newspaper report that caught Kim Dong-sik’s attention; she repeats her criticism of male selfishness; and the maid Myung-sook comes in the room to bring coffee. Both women and both kids then go away, leaving Kim Dong-sik alone; he then looks straight at the camera and, relaxed and hilarious, makes a speech warning men against their sexual drives and the temptation of seducing young women, although he seems to be unconcerned by such bad thoughts.
This moralistic stance, expressed in such a good-humored style, seems destined to assuage a prim audience. But the start of this coda is far more thrilling: it suggests the Mrs. Kim’s mind actually wandered as she was reading the item; what the film showed was her dreadful speculation such a real story could unfold at her home; her anger, including when she walks out holding Myung-sook by the arm, is real. The film thus presents itself as a journey into the anxiety and the paranoia of a married woman trying to cope with the sexual predatory nature of a younger woman lurking around. Far from being modern and confident, Mrs. Kim could then be cast as an unstable character undermined by sexual fear – as much as material success is perverting her outlook. The housemaid’s tale becomes a surprising, extensive, and disturbing exploration of women’s psyche assailed by dark fantasies where men are just what is at stakes and not the main players.