a cautionary tale
by
Douglas Messerli
Kim
Ki-young (writer and director) 하녀Hanyeo (The Housemaid) / 1960
In a manner
somewhat reminiscent of the films of Douglas Sirk, Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid of 1960 is a hothouse
melodrama with a nearly absurdly clotted story-line with elements of a horror
tale. Indeed a great many aspects of the story are never quite explained: why,
for example, is the composer Dong-sik Kim’s (Kim Jin-kyu) daughter Ae-soon
crippled? Why are so many young women factory workers literally swooning over
the handsome music teacher? And why is Kim, himself, so prudish that when one
of the workers writes him a love note, he reports her to factory officials and
she is fired, later committing suicide?
Just as inexplicable is the fact that
her fellow worker, Kyung-hee Cho (who may actually have written the
lover-letter) suddenly determines to take piano lessons from Kim? And why later
does she suggest Myung-sook (Lee Eun-shim), another fellow worker, take the job
of the Kim family’s housemaid, with she, herself, paying part of her salary?
How, if the Kims must both work to
survive—Mrs. Kim does sewing from home—can they afford a large new attachment
to their current home? And why is it hinted that Kim’s wife was greedy in
desiring such a large house? Moreover, how can they afford a housemaid on top
of building a new addition?
Certainly we can speculate on some of
these issues. It is clear that Kyung-hee is also in love with the composer, and
takes lessons to be near him. Since the Kims are expecting a third child, they
desperately need more space. Perhaps like many children of the 1950s, the
daughter may have contracted polio. And Kim’s traditional decorum is what helps
to make him ripe for a comeuppance in the form of a love affair with his maid.
But even providing answers for these
curious plot-twists does not necessarily lead to the central story, which
presents the housemaid as a kind of femme
fatale, who, after being convinced by Kim’s wife to abort the composer’s
baby in her womb, determines to destroy this nuclear family, killing both the
son (by pretending to feed him rat poison) and daughter (by forcing her to eat
poison-laced rice).
To
large degree, through this melodramatic series of events, the director is
actually creating a comic and witty series of happenings that prove that
rationality can easily go awry. And in these slightly campy and fully ghoulish
goings-on, Kim certainly pulls the rug from under the family’s smug sense of
morality. In fact, the movie ends with the composer, evidently the narrator of
this tale, explaining to us, his audience, that everything we just saw was a
fiction, but it might truly happen to anyone, making the whole work a kind of
cautionary tale.
The unexplained details, accordingly,
distract us, just as the characters are utterly distracted, from what is really
important in perceiving reality, that evil lurks everywhere the hearts of
mankind.
Today The
Housemaid reads almost like an earlier—and far more complex—version of
Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction; but
unlike that 1987 film, Kim’s work gives us plenty of psychological clues for
his composer-character’s downfall. Both husband and wife, while outwardly
seeming perfectly matched and normal, subtly torture their children (the father
is determined that his daughter should climb steeps stairs to strengthen her
arms and legs) and benignly neglect them. Both children, like children
everywhere, bizarrely taunt one another. And all the Kims have centered their
life on money and upward mobility far too much. In the end, it is almost as if
their children’s and the maid’s future child must be sacrificed to their own
sense of propriety and so that the composer won’t lose his job, despite the
fact that he had forced another to lose hers.
That this high comic morality play was
made during a period when Korea was ruled by a censoring military government is
even more amazing. And then—because of the reuse of cinema stock in the brims
of hats and in mining silver from the old frames—almost lost to film audiences
forever (the missing first two reels were discovered and the film restored for
the Cannes Film Festival in 2008) is astounding. Eight of Kim’s other films
have forever disappeared.
Los Angeles, December
20, 2016
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