The ongoing renaissance in South Korean cinema is too stylistically diverse to constitute a movement, but its major filmmakers—Park Chanwook (Oldboy), Lee Chang-dong (Secret Sunshine), Kim Ki-duk (3-Iron), Hong Sang-soo (Woman Is the Future of Man)—share a taste for complex narratives that challenge social taboos. The most brazen of the bunch may be Im Sang-soo, whose work is founded on his irreverence toward national sacred cows. With The President’s Last Bang (2005) he created a slick black comedy around the 1979 assassination of President Park Chung-hee; the president’s son, Park Ji-man, was so offended by the film that he sued for defamation, hoping to block its release. By presenting sensitive subject matter in unabashedly bold terms, Im pushes viewers to take a hard stand on issues most people would prefer to tiptoe around.
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This is certainly true of Im’s latest feature, The Housemaid. The film is a remake of a 1960 thriller by Kim Ki-young that’s widely regarded as a gem of South Korean cinema. In the original film a middle-class teacher at a women’s college hires a beautiful student to serve as his children’s live-in nanny. After winning over his wife and children, the young woman seduces the teacher, begs him to ditch his wife, grows increasingly violent, and ultimately holds his children hostage. For the new version, however, Im has transplanted the basic premise to a filthy rich family and turned the young nanny into a poor woman with few opportunities for advancement. The filmmaker told the website 10 Asia that he wanted to remake the movie so he could highlight the disparity between South Korea’s rich and poor, which has grown substantially since 1960. In considering the young woman’s plight, Im asks whether anyone in poverty can cross that corrupt class divide without becoming corrupted herself.
Shortly afterward Im introduces Eun-yi (Jeon Do-yeon), a college graduate in early education who now works as a cook and lives in a dingy apartment. One morning she’s visited by Mrs. Cho (Yun Yeo-jong), head servant of the wealthy Goh family, who’s come to interview her for the nanny job. (“You need to know how a person lives,” she says, surveying the tidy little apartment with the cool eye of a surveillance expert.) Hired on the spot, Eun-yi moves into the Gohs’ palatial home and immediately learns her place when the mother, Ha Rae (Woo Seo), orders her to hand-wash a pair of dirty panties. The elegantly dressed father, Hoon (Lee Jung-jae), might be a CEO or high-ranking government official, and the family is uniformly derisive toward its servants. Eun-yi seems to have entered not a household but a little kingdom.
