La servante

Suicides, attempted suicides, blackmail, murder, attempted murder, adultery, paranoia -- the goings-on in this bizarre and fascinating melodrama put even MANJI to shame.

No wonder one critic calls director Kim "Douglas Sirk on acid" -- while Western audiences may laugh at some of the overheated melodrama, this potboiler nonetheless is pretty wild for 1960, and manages to be both lurid and unforgettable. (It's also got one of the great death scenes *ever* -- see for yourself!)

Allow me to add to the hype: this film is as delirious as they come. Starting out as a typical realist glance into 1960's South Korea as centered on a upwardly-mobile family, after the plot gets settled, becomes a hysterical and expressionistic tale of corrosive sin and deception. The transformation of one night's flirtation into a grandiose moral eradication is the one of the most stunning turns of atmosphere I've ever seen in a film. Also amazing is how your view of the characters changes dramatically as they are faced with this living hell. While researching about the director, I found out that the actress who played the housemaid, Eun-shim Lee, fulfilled the part so well that she couldn't find work after this movie. Audience members were literally screaming for her death at the original showings! See this film just for her, you won't regret it! I can't say enough great things about the director Kim Ki-young, too bad most of his films aren't available in English!

Not a perfect film, but certainly an intriguing and timely one, coming out at a time when films around the world were breaking boundaries and pushing their subject matter to the next level - think PSYCHO and PEEPING TOM, for instance. This distinctly Korean movie takes a look at issues involving class, gender roles, family dynamics and social norms, all set in a middle class household where the arrival of the titular character explodes tensions and invokes horror all round. Well shot and very well acted, this is occasionally dated and melodramatic, a little slow at times, with an ending that doesn't quite work, but otherwise it's well worth a look.

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.

"Hanyo" ("The Housemaid") works like a very good piece of classical music: It has a slow beginning that seems to go forever, then it adds some crescendos here and there to makes us alarmed, creating a thrilling suspense and a dramatic situation that leads to a powerful and killer ending. You might applause after all that, both the music and the film because when you see the whole picture you realize what a wonderful and memorable works of art they are.

The housemaid of the title is a dangerous female student who enters in the life of a married piano teacher trying to get love from him, no matter if the teacher's wife and kids will suffer so that they can be together. The teacher is controlled by both housemaid and the wife, and he needs to make a decision fast before things get worse for everyone. Here's a story about the value of family in the middle of betrayals, delusions, obsession, tradition, real love versus psychotic forms of love, and plenty of more keywords you may think.

At times "Fatal Attraction" appeared in my mind since there's a significant similarity between both films, and if the story sounds like cliché it is but you must see how it works and who is working with. We're talking about a Korean film and as some of us know, Asian females in older films didn't have the kind of roles the women had in here, powerful and energetic characters that almost boss around with the only men in the story like he was a puppy dog. And the villain? Oh boy! She was one of the most dramatic and perfectly well written villains of all time. Frightening, desperate to the point of threatening the teacher's kids who gets suspicious of everything she serves to them thinking they might get poisoned, this woman knows how to find a answer to everything in order to ruin people's lives, from false rumors to murder.

Don't be let down by the slowness of the first half hour (the characters introduction), try to stay focused all the time and you'll be totally surprised until the very last minute. This is a great film! 9/10