La criada

An interesting mix of film noir, melodrama, and morality tale, which also does a good job of keeping the audience off-balance. There may also be some social commentary in here relative to class and making us wonder to what lengths someone will go to preserve their reputation and upward mobility, but I think these were in a minor key, even if the film does bring Parasite to mind. There is something mythical about how this woman manages to invert the whole order of this house, and yet it's also got moments that are intensely dramatic and real, and that was interesting. The threat always seems clear and present to us, because the housemaid (Lee Eun-shim) seems a little off, there are constant trips to the cupboard with rat poison, and the family has a couple of kids. The character actions never quite seem to make sense which worked against it for me, but that's a part of what works the audience up into a frenzy, and keeps it a wild ride.

The acting in the film is unfortunately not one of its highlights, but Lee Eun-shim certainly is striking in the shots of her glaring through the window, and sultry when she's getting intimate with her boss (Kim Jin-kyu). I liked the shot of her bare feet stepping up onto his shoes, followed by the one of his back as her arms circled around him, and in a later scene when her calf sinuously winding around his - they capture the seduction well. Less successful were the cliché, heavy-handed moments, like the lightning hitting a tree after the first infidelity (it made me think of the cliché opening to a novel, It was a dark and stormy night....). The cinematography is pretty nice, though I wish it hadn't been as confined and given a little more freedom.

At its bottom though, this is a conservative film about the importance of family and avoiding the female temptress, which is an age old and tired theme. And even if the man can't manage that, well, his wife should shoulder some blame, and in this case, she does, for having wanted a bigger house (ugh). It was for this reason and for the unevenness in the character motivations that I didn't rate the film higher, but it was certainly entertaining, and definitely had camp appeal.

Quote: "Where are you going?" "Your daddy is going to sleep with me tonight."

I haven't seen before melodrama as stunning, shocking, utterly ridiculous and in full knowledge of it, Korea's cautionary tale answer on marital infidelity to Reefer Madness if it weren't at the same time as cinematically vibrant and obstinate as the best works of Sam Fuller, driven by suspenseful will and heavy with undertones of something at once sinister and horrifying to make you think parts of it were destined at some point for Les Diaboliques or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, as Ki-young Kim's The Housemaid; for all intents and purposes, this is melodrama a-go-go, not in the cosmopolitan sense of the term, but ironic and campy, a dazzling movie steeped in artifice and insanely interesting human behaviour that sets out to provoke and push common sense to a limit.

A well to do couple hires a maid to help out the wife with the chores around the house, but no sooner has she gone into the kitchen to get a glass of water than the entire household threatens to collapse in ruins of rat poison and unwanted pregnancies, illicit thrysts and alliances striken casually and alternatively between the wife and the maid who is now a mistress, the wife and the husband against the maid who they need to be rid off before she talks of the affair, the maid and the husband against each other and their own selves.

The other movie I've seen by Ki-young Kim is, Iodo, a Korean version of The Wicker Man that takes place in a remote island populated exclusively by fisherwomen. It was also utterly bonkers, the most outrageous plotting this side of Italian exploitation, but it lacked the ability to see that in itself, to recognize the madness and defy it. The Housemaid at first seems like the product of Ed Wood incompetence. Some of the dialogue and character behavior had me in stitches. But it soon reveals that to be a facade which the movie can lift and put back in place at whim, so that it can be all things to all people not because of any particular notion of ambiguity shared by Ki-young Kim because the movie is blunt like a hammer in the face, but because it doesn't abide by any notion of common sense or realism unless it wants to. The movie behaves with the same audacity of its maid protagonist. It sets up an image of a socially upwards mobile household where a couple can afford to buy a television even if it means hours of slaving away on a sewing machine to get it, and then affronts it violently, perversely toys with it and corrupts it to the heart.

In the end, if any more clue was required, we get fourth walls broken and a man winking straight at us. This is Panic Theater at its best, with the selfaware avant-garde tropes replaced by unselfconscious soap opera clichés.

I bought this film on NTSC-VHS format from an online Korean business called koreapop.com. The copy evidently had been put together from two or three diffrent copies of the film, since some parts of the film looked like they were in better shape than others, and also there were English subtitles in some parts, but not most others. (Note that I bought this film knowing that it would be in Korean, with no subtitles).

This movie features what is probably the first scene in cinematic history where a woman rapes a man- a whole 25 years before Isabella Rosellini raped Kyle McCallahan in "Blue Velvet"! As a Korean movie, it's story challenges traditional Korean propriety. The housemaid character is a castrating hose-beast: Not exactly the kind of Korean woman portrayed in most Korean movies made then or now. Director Kim Kiyoung tends to turn the conventional Korean-movie plotline on its head in this movie, since there is no real "happy-ending", in fact, things just seem to get worse and worse. The only other Korean movie similar to it in this sense, is the recently released "Kilimanjaro" (also an EXCELLENT film). This movie is indeed a Korean-movie classic. It's just too bad that the remaining copies of such classic Korean films are not given the best of care, since many, like this one, are in fairly rough shape. I hope that the Koreans will take more pride in their cinematic history and prepare for better archival storage and restoration of their nation's film legacy.

Ki-young Kim's "The Housemaid" proved an interesting viewing experience for me, in that it ultimately differed very much from what I had come to expect about a half hour into the film. What we appear to have here is another film like Joseph Losey's "The Servant", which was a left-wing, revolutionary exercise in which a lower class man enters an upper class household as a servant, and ultimately takes over the bourgeois home, throwing it into upheaval and chaos. Likewise, in "The Housemaid", a young woman joins a wealthier household as a maid, and instantly things begin to take a turn toward disorder and familial disintegration. It could easily be a revolutionary, communist film like Losey's. It is not.

In fact, it is the polar opposite. It turns out that "The Housemaid" is actually an overtly conservative film. This film is undebatably a defense of traditional family values like faithfulness, fidelity, and monogamy. Another film with a virtually identical plot could have just as easily been an attack on those same values. In "The Housemaid", however, the character of the maid is not the instrument of revolution, the hand of Marxist justice that has come to wipe out every trace of bourgeois society from our microcosmic household (e.g. Dirk Bogarde's character in "The Servant"); rather, she is the face of temptation, the tantalizer that will be the destruction of a healthy, happy family, should the patriarchal figure fall into that inescapable abyss of adultery.

Some viewers have interpreted the film in other ways, though I don't see how they could. This isn't that kind of film. There really isn't anything ambiguous here. The only exception — the one place where interpretation of the film's message might become a bit convoluted — is the framing device that Kim uses at the film's bookends. I would note the likelihood that this was added for the sake of the censors. After all, it is somewhat surprising that Kim got this film passed in the first place, and the frame story, which abruptly obliterates the reality of the film's central storyline, may have been the only reason he was able to do so. Despite my usual partiality for any kind of narrative complexity or nonlinear structure, I felt this device was mildly detrimental to the film's integrity. Regardless, it really doesn't change anything about the nature of the film's message.

Thematically, the key moment in the film comes fairly early on, immediately after the decisive act of infidelity. Kim goes to great lengths to underline this instant as the pivotal moment in the lives of his characters, a moment from which there will be no return. He achieves this rather heavy-handedly, by cutting away from the room in which the action occurs, to a shot of a large tree standing outside the house, which is immediately struck by lightning, as if to make it abundantly clear, written in Fuller-esque boldface type: This is the moment that changes everything! This is the undoing of a family!

It's not a subtle film, needless to say. There are, however, master touches throughout. The cinematography is certainly impressive, as is Kim's direction. The laterally panning shots through the plate glass on the upper floor of the house are fantastic. It is quite a well shot film, and Kim works inspiringly within the limited space of only a few settings.

Dramatically, however, "The Housemaid" was somewhat disappointing. The film can't decide whether it wants to be a Buñuelian art film or a Hitchcockian thriller, and the resulting blend is very uneven, increasingly as the film progresses. Kim never gives this film any real, constant identity. The score was quite poor. With its obtrusive and highly transparent attempts at creating tension and coercing the viewer into a certain emotion, it never ceased to intrude on the viewing experience.

This may be a political film — it certainly has a plainly conservative message — but if it is, it's not because Kim intended it to be. Despite being pressured by his government to foray into political filmmaking on a few occasions, Kim himself was not particularly interested in politics. He once said, "North or south, capitalist or communist, ideology is far less interesting to me than the things that divide the sexes."

Indeed, this is evident in "The Housemaid". Kim is clearly much more interested in the boundaries and barriers between men and women — the impediments that obstruct the path to intimacy and healthy relationships — than he is in any specific political ideology. And this is where the film regains some of its composure. Comparisons have been made to the work of Luis Buñuel and Shôhei Imamura. I can see it, in terms of its portrayal of passion and conflicted attempts at intimacy between the sexes, but on the whole I think those are pretty loose comparisons. "The Housemaid" works best as a psychological drama. When we analyze the motives of the characters, and what drives each of them toward their respective actions, the film comes into focus fairly nicely. When it tries to move into suspense, however, it looses its momentum as a drama, and as a successful, cohesive work of cinema.

All things considered, I think this is a good film. I can't call it a masterpiece, or even a great film, although I know many feel that way about it, but I do think it's quality cinema that's worth seeing. My biggest complaint with the film is its extreme lack of subtlety, in multiple facets of the art of filmmaking. Dramatically, "The Housemaid" goes way over the top one too many times, and thematically, the film essentially boils down to a cautionary tale about adultery and infidelity. Nonetheless, it's a film that deserves to be seen, especially with the relatively small place that South Korea occupies in the cinematic landscape.

RATING: 7.33 out of 10

When it ended, i was shook. I couldn't believe how insane this movie is. Insane in a good way. I couldn't believe this is a 1960 movie. Even by today standards, this is insane and mindblowing. During the first 20-30 minutes, i thought i knew where it goes and the same will everyone think. But make no mistake, you don't have a clue where it goes. It's not just cheap twists that made this unpredictable but organically flowing turns of the story. I mean, this is coherent and it doesn't shock you just for the shake of shock, with dumb twists that come out of nowhere. The person who wrote this knew exactly what he was doing. Because this is not just insane but brilliant too.

I can't rate it higher because i was not that excited during the first 40-50 minutes. This movie takes its time. I repeat, you think it is just an ordinary story, like a drama romance film noir of this era, with lovers thinking the same old schemes etc. No, it's not. This is way too original and creative. Of course way better than the mediocre 2010 version. The 2010 HANYO is not good. But this is.

Icing on the cake: The last minute. I couldn't believe my own eyes, i watched it three times, that indicates how much i loved it.