SFIAAFF '10: The Housemaid

Before the Korean New Wave (represented by such international film festival faves as Lee Chang-dong, Hong Sang-soo and Kim Ki-duk) and long before homegrown productions like Shiri, Oldboy, and The Host began dominating the Seoul box office, there was a "Golden Age" of South Korean cinema, and the landmark that started that cine-luminous era was the late Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960, a/k/a Hanyo). Bay Area audiences will finally have a chance to view this classic in the type of venue it was meant to be screened in, The Castro Theatre, on March 14, as part of the 28th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Thanks to the committed restoration efforts of the Korean Film Archives, with support from the World Cinema Foundation, we will get to see it in a print closer to the state of its initial premiere screening. 　

Kim Ki-young's directorial debut, The Box of Death (1955), was the first Korean film to both use a Mitchell camera and to be filmed in synchronous sound. Kim built the set and directed most of the lighting, an independent, low-budget focus that he carried with him throughout most of his career. An anti-Communist film made under the auspices of the United States Information Service, its title is a metaphor for a time bomb. The Box of Death was seen by some critics of the time as anti-Communist in name only, as if more interested in currying favor with what was deemed the less reputable sentiments to be entertained. Still, it had contemporary defenders, such as writer Oh Young-jin, who advocated that the film was a "new type of anti-Communist film," hinting at how Kim would later push genres beyond their borders. 　

Kim was not known as a political director in terms of the sociopolitics of the Cold War that left the Korean peninsula divided. In some ways, The Box of Death is an anomaly in Kim's oeuvre—just a film to get his career jumpstarted—and both it and nearly all of Kim’s films prior to The Housemaid have been lost to us. The single exception is his second film, Yongsan Province, also released in 1955. Still, significant parts of that film are missing, including the ending. As Lee Yeon-ho presents in his introduction to the Kim Ki-young installment in the Korean Film Directors series, those who have seen these extinct films recall that Kim's style started out using realism to depict everyday lives. (Yongsan Province, with its missing hallucinatory ending where two lovers ascend to heaven, certainly brings that generalization of realist style into question.) 　

The Housemaid is seen by scholars as a new beginning for Kim, where he began to address the rapid, state-demanded, modernization of South Korea through the horror genre and the fantastical. For film scholar Chris Berry, this marks a challenge to the theory that it inherently resulted in realist expressions on stage, screen and in literature. In The Housemaid—and his subsequent work—Kim demonstrates that the paradoxes and anxieties could be revealed through fantasy, instead.

　 The film was based on a real murder case in which a maid killed the young child of her employers. The film smashed the Korean box office record up until that time, and it’s fair to extrapolate that its impact partly stemmed from the audience's awareness of the true-life incident. In the film, Dong-sik (Kim Jin-kyu) is a piano teacher for a local textile mill who finds himself confronted by the affections of one of his students, Seon-yeong. (Of note: Dong-sik is a popular name for Kim's literally and metaphorically impotent males.) When he brings this to the attention of the mill's housemother, Seon-yeong loses her job. Her friend Gyeong-hee is taking personal piano lessons from Dong-sik at his home and introduces his family to Myeong-sook (Lee Eun-sim) when they express interest in a maid. Dong-sik is apparently quite the passive paramour, because Gyeong-hee also confesses her love for him, which he also refuses. Having witnessed this rejection, Myeong-sik tries her hand at wooing Dong-sik, and—third time's a charm—she finds herself pregnant with his child. Dong-sik’s wife (Joo Jeung-nyeo) pressures Myeong-sik to abort the child, leading to a violent psychological shift in Myeong-sik that brings about the eventual destruction of the family, or so we think. 　

　 Along with being an allegory to teach wayward men the consequences of infidelity, Kim's film is a manifestation of the paradox of desiring modernity while also feeling anxious about this desire. As Laurel Kendall notes in her introduction to Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, "Since the late 1960’s, the entire South Korean urbanscape has been quite literally under construction: torn down, rebuilt, extended, elaborated, reconfigured." This was all part of the rush enacted under the Park Chung-hee dictatorship. This innovation did not arise from an emerging middle-class, nor did it happen under a democracy; it was state-dictated. As a result, the South Korean people of the 1960’s were ambivalent towards the change.

　 Amongst the two-level houses full of new appliances and other signifiers of modern upgrades (including the piano, grandfather clocks and the hiring of in-house help) that fill the post-Housemaid oeuvre of Kim Ki-young, there exists a tension of something not quite right, of a rat in the (modern) kitchen waiting to strike. Although Park Chung-hee's did not begin his full-steam charge forward until 1961, The Housemaid plays with this slowly simmering tension that found its most salient manifestation in horror, with just the right dash of melodrama to ease it down. Notes Berry in his contribution to Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema (ed. Frances Gateward), “[Kim's] films can be both considered under the rubric of the horror film and an ambivalent response to the Korean experience of modernization as at once forced and desired. This paradoxical state that defies either realist representation or critical distance prefers direct somatic response and full ambivalence.” Outside of porn, nothing provides a somatic response from its audience like horror.

　 Said response was so strong for some women that, according to Kim So-young in her chapter in South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and National Cinema (eds. Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann), those watching The Housemaid were reported to scream demands that the characters "Kill the bitch!" The bitch, in their eyes, was the character of Myeong-sik and the destruction of middle-class hopes she represented, rather than the husband who equally consummated this self-ruin. Although no direct backstory is provided for Myeong-sik, South Koreans knew she was a composite of the new demographic shifts: young woman were coming to Seoul from rural South Korea to find work in factories. When they didn’t find such jobs, if they were able to avoid prostitution, they often became maids for the wealthy. (Yu Hyon-mok’s 1969 feature School Excursion includes a related if improbable plot twist: a rural schoolboy goes on a field trip to stay with a wealthy Seoul family, whose maid, unbeknownst to anyone, is the boy's sister.) Women watching The Housemaid refused to align with the plight of the maid, instead forming solidarity with the wife. The film is regularly contextualized for western audiences by referencing 1987's Fatal Attraction in the program notes, as it is in the program for this year's SFIAAF. As Mason Wiley and Damien Bona note in Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards, the original ending of Fatal Attraction saw Glenn Close's character committing suicide. This ending fell flat with test audiences, so it was reworked to have Michael Douglas' wife kill the mistress, as if director Adrian Lynne heard the echoing demands of Korean housewives in 1960.

　 Kim would rework the film two more times as Woman of Fire (1971, a/k/a Hwanyeo) and Woman of Fire ‘82. Like its predecessor, Woman of Fire would also lead the box office in 1971. The success of The Housemaid and its remakes can be seen in other Kim films that reconfigure similar themes, such as the top film of 1972, The Insect Woman (itself remade by Kim as Carnivore in 1984). Soon we will have yet another film to test The Housemaid's lasting effects, in a new version by director Im Sang-soo (The President's Last Bang). The latest remake of this thrice remade film will feature one of South Korea's best actresses, Jeon Do-yeon (Happy End, Untold Scandal and Secret Sunshine, the latter for which she received the Best Actress Award at Cannes), and after a two-year hiatus, Lee Jung-jae (Il Mare, Typhoon). Plus, Yoon Yeo-jung, who debuted as the housemaid in Woman of Fire, will play a sort of all-seeing, older maid. As quoted in the January/February 2010 edition of Korean Cinema Today, Yoon expressed: "My heart is full of deep emotion that I could play one of his films again" because she wasn’t aware of how amazing a director Kim was back then. She was perhaps too thrown by Kim's strange rehearsal habits, requiring her to meet for an hour every day for a month before filming, in order to instruct her by referencing a specific smile or reaction she made on a particular day building up to her debut. [ed. note: And we thought Stanley Kubrick was a perfectionist!]

　 What's interesting about the critical re-visioning of Kim Ki-young's work is that he came to be reconsidered in South Korea as a cult director, a label Kim himself disowned. In the Korean Film Archives' Documentary on Film People: Kim Ki-young, he states his preference, “I’d rather they called me the father of independent films than a director of cult movies.” In an intriguing essay by Chris Berry in Post-Colonial Classics of Korean Cinema (ed. Chungmoo Choi), Berry ponders why Kim Ki-young’s 1997 retrospective at the 2nd Pusan International Film Festival provided the international entry point for South Korean cinema: "Kim Ki-young's films fit the bill. They satisfy the demand for an auteur and are stylistically distinctive, differentiating them from other films already circulating through the art house and festival circuit." Kim's films do this while still remaining "distinctively Korean," a balancing act international audiences demand from their films elsewhere. In a sense, we have Kim to partly thank for all the wonderful South Korean films we have been enjoying for the past decade. His PIFF retrospective broke through the barrier keeping such films from being noticed outside of the peninsula, just as he ripped away the curtain covering the fears beneath the fevered rush to modernization of his fellow countrymen and women.

Posted by ahillis at March 9, 2010 1:09 PM