South Korea, 1971
Directed by Kim Ki-young
With Youn Yuh-jung (Myeong-ja), Namkoong Won (Dong-shik), Jeon Gye-hyeon (Jeong-suk), Oh Young-Ah (Hye-ok)
Splatter of blood on a rock and on a face: this is the grisly end of a rape as a young woman from the countryside fights back the two blacksmiths who have assaulted her and her best friend. Blood, however, would not get staunched in the course of Myeong-ja’s life and the dreadful red would haunt her in Seoul, physically or metaphorically, as the red liquid keeps spilling in stunning circumstances or red lights shroud a love affair warped by insanity, till the horrible conclusion – a couple of bloodied, lifeless bodies lying on the floor of a house turned into a crime scene, a perfect detective story scene that actually opened the film.
Myeong-ja’s story is reconstructed through flashbacks, sparked by the statements to the police of her friend Hye-ok who tagged along her when both fled their village and their crime. At this point theirs is the tale of folks from the countryside struggling to find a job in booming, fast-modernizing Seoul, falling into the hands of shady go-between. Hye-ok becomes a bar hostess while Myeong-ja is hired by entrepreneur Jeong-suk. This lady is running an industrial-scale farm breeding hens to sell loads of eggs and needs a maid to help her with her two kids and a husband, Dong-shik, a music composer who churns out syrupy pop songs.
Jeong-suk increasingly relies on Myeong-ja even as the country girl is rather clumsy and silly, not only for the domestic chores or to take care of the poultry but also to watch Dong-shik who is always solicited by young women dreaming of music success. Trouble is that one evening a drunken Dong-shik sleeps with a surprised but not very reluctant Myeong-ja. And they would not let it remain an accidental one-night stand.
The narrative becomes increasingly toxic and tragic, painting a disquieting and shocking landscape shaped by perversion and horror as they over a posh and modernistic house: moving up and down or pacing frantically across the place, the wife, the maid now turned mistress, and the husband are caught into a spiral of self-destruction. The two women become bitter rivals unable to break their dubious bonds. The wife still needs a maid and is fully aware the husband wants her too while the mistress wants to satisfy her desire and to make it bring a material reward – the odd conditions of her job contract is that she does not get any wages but would be helped to get married; in the meantime she is lodged, fed and protected; obviously her love affair with the husband changes the rules. The abortion Myeong-ja has been forced to undergo as the only possible father was Dong-shik is the first decisive step in poisoning the relations between the three and to push her into outright madness. When the go-between who put Myeong-ja in touch with Jeong-suk reckons to get a reward, and a carnal one rather than the cash Myeong-ja cannot anyway cough up, things turn crazier: he tries to rape her in her room at Jeong-suk’s house but she kills him; she reckons to link the crime to her lover to embarrass a wobbling Dong-shik; but it is Jeong-suk who eventually takes care of the business, fueling even more hatred and fear between the three adults. Suicide is deemed by Dong-shik and Myeong-ja as the best way to get rid of the grim reality and to stay together forever but Dong-shik’s sense of honor as a husband makes that mawkish finale far more complicated.
If Dong-shik can be viewed, and dismissed, as a fickle male losing common sense as he is unable to make a choice between the erotic desire Myeong-ja projects and the psychological support Jeong-suk offers, the case of the two women is more complex and harrowing. Clearly Myeong-ja is cast as hysterical, an unstable and unsatisfied woman whose sexual impulse leads her to a crazy and creepy vision of love but also of social domination. Jeong-suk stands as a far more opaque person influenced by a traditional vision of marriage, respect for her husband’s feelings, memories of conjugal happiness, and also a sense of achievement. The last image, of a disheveled and desperate woman stumbling her way in pouring rain, collapsing and crying, shows she is not only a pervert but also a victim.
The film is a variation of a previous success by Kim Ki-young, “Hanyo – The Housemaid” (1960). It is a brutal, stunning exploration of sexual madness, with a scathing take on the South Korean society. From the start of Myeong-ja’s story it is clear that women are just preys of the male instincts, doomed to get hurt: the scene of the rape is preceded by shots of the two young woman watching the blacksmiths working on a red-hot scrap of iron. Hye-ok ends up as a prostitute. If Jeong-suk does not lower herself to physical exploitation she still remains a tool helping Dong-shik to enjoy his carefree life. Myeong-ja’s passion is insane but also ambiguous: she makes her female sexual needs a selfish pursuit that upsets the position of men and obeys to her own fantasy, even if it is rather distorted and dumb (her vision of conjugal suicide reeks of a naive discourse fitting run-of-the-mill romance books). But she is also tries to benefit from the situation, trying to be the winner coming from the bottom of the society over privileged people.
How the camera handles the topography is remarkable. The room where Myeong-ja is stuck is in fact at the top – so the stairs become the strategic place where the maid and the couple fight over sex and power, where blood is spilled, including the blood of the baby that Jeong-suk gives birth to, and where the world is turned upside down: at the top stands the individual belonging to the lower classes and gripped by the lowest instincts, dominating the rest of the house where wander those who are at the top of the society but are also mired in a moral morass they cannot get over. Gaudy lighting and props emphasize the torment and the peril in this elegant house while the camera lingers in front of screens and frames of French windows and doors to capture distorted images of desire (sex is usually shot through those colored and grilled partitions, suggesting a lot without being really lurid). And the poultry farm loses its image of industrial success to morph into the ghost of a slaughterhouse.
The most stunning element of the mise en scène is the slanted, stroboscopic style that percolates through the narration. Bold and bizarre viewpoints enhance the impact of outrageous situations and performances while slides from a projector burst onto the screen, showing images of the violence wreaking havoc in the wider world, from the Vietnam War to the atom bomb, sometimes mixed with red-colored stills of the characters in action, in a befuddling leitmotif. This love story going awry seems to belong to a deeper chaos where carnal instincts meet the bestial ones (and there is a lot to be said about those hens and chickens, the way they are fed and the way they are eaten, in a twisted reflection about the carnivorous nature of the humans, even more of the humans in love). This is an astringent but highly aesthetic vision of the world running against the grain of the image a conservative authoritarian power hopes to project. No, says director Kim Ki-young, people cannot be reduced to simple soldiers of a staid and stable society; they are stirred by strong passions, needs and traumas modern filmmaking should show. Modernity is just a mask.