A remake of a film from the '60s, this story is based on true events that occurred in Geumcheon, one of the 25 districts of Seoul, South Korea.

The subject matter is murky and scandalous, revolving around the maid; a psychological drama, sharp and erotic comedy with politically incorrect implications.

As a good sociologist, the director highlights the gender dichotomies, even more pronounced in modern times, to emphasize how, beyond the economy, the power dynamics between people and their possible reactions have changed.

Euny is hired as a co-housekeeper in a very wealthy upper-class Korean family to take care of the child and the pregnant mother of twins.

She is beautiful and young, and her legs attract the attention of Hoon, the master and patriarch of the house, also handsome, young, and powerful, tired of a sacrificed sexuality with a child-wife Hera, now too pregnant. Thus begins a relationship of seduction, submission, and manipulation that will lead to the most extreme and unthinkable consequences. The director's intent is to describe the "super-rich" of our days, people living a parallel reality completely out of context. "In their golden and secret refuges, they orchestrate our lives," says Im Sang Soo, who continues to observe his characters with the skill of an anthropologist.

The film is far from a simple erotic suspense; it is a document on the evolution of customs and social classes.

"The origin of the violence Asian men commit within their families," says the director, "strips them of feelings. They suffer from a deeply rooted inferiority complex, which they release by exercising violence at home." The Asians' complex stems from the knockout suffered due to defeat during the colonial wars, and the feeling of inferiority and humiliation requires the false clue of filling their role as patriarchs within the family. This happens both in working-class neighborhoods and in wealthy areas.

A suicide opens the film in a working-class neighborhood; another will close the film in Hoon's luxurious house, and it will be Euny who spectacularly and artistically takes her own life. Her act is demonstrative, a death ritual meant to inflict physical, moral, and psychological damage that lasts over time. In the final scene, art takes center stage; through a spectral context, "Happy Birthday" is sung to the child to console her from the trauma, after giving her a gift of great economic and artistic value, an investment. But perhaps not everything can be bought, especially if one does not have the courage to talk to her and tries to live as if nothing happened.

The film is set in a modern villa, contemporary architecture and soft lines mixed with an irritating lack of joy and life. It is a collection of luxury and beauty clashing with moral bankruptcy. It is a social, mythological fairy tale, where the child-wife Hera has an unfaithful, charming, and oppressive husband, Zeus.

The camera is sensuality and cruelty. It is a satire on the family that, due to opulence, has lost touch with reality and will remain a victim of it all their lives.

Rare is the visual elegance that causes vertigo; ambiguous and tense is the condition of the servants who have reached social submission in their flesh.

The maid offers her services to her masters in total physical and passionate abandonment, literally putting her body at their disposal.

Social, organic, cannibalistic disturbance.

Im Sang Soo raises the issue of freedom: the servant maintains the freedom to take their own life while the master is always bound by money and their own model. The power of money is a powerful caricature.

Rather than in the '60s, when she ensnared the man, today the woman surrenders to the disillusionment of the myth of emancipation in a society that, despite its contradictions, remains fundamentally anchored to a patriarchal structure.

Fragments and quotes from the film:

The child mimics her father: "It's important to be kind, it seems like a gesture of respect, but you actually get more."

Hera, the child-wife, reads "The Second Sex" by Simone De Beauvoir, thus taking the title literally.

Hera's mother: "When you marry a rich man, infidelity is part of the package... Let him sleep with whoever he wants. Later, you can enjoy the benefits of your role and live like a queen."

Euny, the pregnant maid in high heels, will wear them for any household chore and say to Hoon: "I know you don't even consider me a human being, but the child is yours... I'm sorry for getting pregnant by someone like you."

The old housekeeper reflects on her work: "Think about what you will have to endure, and then you become impenetrable like stone." She will leave the job, and she is asked: "But what are you doing?"

She will reply: "What are you doing? Do you want to continue living like this?"

An obscene, incorrect, murky, unmissable film.

Here the "anthropological mutation" Pasolini spoke of becomes deformation: the unchallenged assertion of capitalism causes an unpredictable assimilation of values, ideals, and lifestyles of the proletarian masses to the logic of consumption, which inevitably includes the female body. This results, even in this context, different from what was expected as the Western destiny, in the erasure of entire cultures against the backdrop of an unprecedented homogenization of humanity. The new power swallows, transforming subjects into consumers, nullifying the very concept of conflict, which is plastically integrated, though leaving minimal and insignificant space, in Eastern culture to the impotent myth of autistic revenge.

Even here, there is not the slightest trace of an impossible fidelity to the past; on the contrary, man is totally relieved of the burden of ideals and lives beyond the conflict between desire and Law. Even transgression is not so because it no longer breaks any rules; what rules is the hypermodern imperative of enjoyment.

No freedom is felt in this film, no desire is evident, no struggle for separation, but widespread alienation...

On the absence of limits and the ashes of the ethics of responsibility stands the most imposing monument to new slavery.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice