The Housemaid (1960: Kim Ki-young: South Korea)
This is now the oldest Korean film I have seen. A couple of reels are pretty poor here (this is talked about in the Scorsese extra as well as the essay link below) which might be the reason it did not get a standalone release. This is only the second South Korean release from Criterion with
Secret Sunshine (2007) being the first. But I would consider this a more important release that probably should have been standalone, but it is part of a very nice boxset
Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project.
You have a pretty good idea what is going to happen in the crux of this story by years of movie conditioning. An unknown maid is hired in a claustrophobic house with an apparently well-liked middle age man (not sure why all the females are falling for him as his presence is so-so) who has a traditional wife with an extra job sewing and two children with the daughter partially disabled. But sometimes you might wonder why the characters behave as they do except for the social commentary of trying to cling to position, job, social status at the cost of dignity, life and sound mind. You get a feeling of Douglas Sirk mixed with Hiroshi Teshigahara (or even a little of Luis Bunuel like
The Exterminating Angel) as the events unfold as the characters seem to have little control (say like firing the maid.) You may wonder why keep rat poison in the household if you are going to stress over it constantly.
But it is a thoroughly watchable film and an important one in Korean cinema.
The ending reminds me of Abbas Kiarostami’s
Taste of Cherry though more didactic and thoroughly Brechtian (
Verfremdungseffekt)* ending. It feels like it comes out of nowhere, but it might have been done to satisfy the censors after all the “horror” that preceded it. A wink-wink and a “be careful” warning of what you might get yourself into if you hire a pretty and crazy maid. Though one might also consider not keeping the rat poison, especially in the kitchen cupboard next to the food and other medicine bottle that look just like it.
The Housemaid was later remade in 2010 by Im Sang-soo (which I have not seen.) Can anyone compare the two?
* This term is often overused in film analysis describing any “breaking the fourth wall” scene. I tend to only use it when it combines direct audience content with a didactic intent which I believe is what Brecht originally intended for this idea. Also, there are so many windows used on the set that you accidently get to see the crew in many scenes.
Martin Scorsese Interview (2:17m): Small little introduction where he talks about the major Korean directors he first saw before getting into earlier ones like Kim Ki-young. I like that he mentions that you can see some of this in later horror films like
Whispering Corridors (I have not seen) and
A Tale of Two Sisters (I have seen.) A kinship with Whispering Well (?) as well as Poe’s writings. Two reels of original negative was lost and talks about removing subtitles from an English print.
Bong Joon-ho on the Housemaid (15:03m): Talks about director who had a cult following in the 1990s. He compares him to Shohei Imamura and Luis Bunuel. Film made right before military dictatorship (Park Chung-hee unlike Chun Doo –hwan). With his talk about hair length it reminds me of the lengths (of hair) imposed still on North Korea. Talks about stairs and how it represents upper middle class because of the two-story house. The same goes for the piano. Housekeeper = monster. Single young women from out of Seoul would do maid jobs in big city. Director remade the same film three times. His talk on the ending echoes some of my statements above.
The Housemaid: Crossing Borders (by Kyung Hyun Kim): “Of the thirty-two feature films Kim made in the course of his career, only twenty-two survive intact. His first picture,
Box of Death (1955), miraculously turned up at the Washington National Records Center in Maryland in 2011, without its sound reel, and a twenty-minute portion of
Touch-Me-Not (1956) was recently recovered, but eight films still remain missing altogether.”
good cast but terrible movie.saying that my first exposure to this was probably the early 80's Rank VHS, though my memory is hazy back then i pretty much thought every kung fu flick i watched was a stone wall classic 
however it is better than....
