Original subtitles

-Hello. I'm Park Chan-wook. -And I'm Lee Dong-jin.

We will start the commentary on the film The Housemaid.

Yes.

I really didn't know that this film was going to be released on Blu-ray Disc.

This is an important event in film history.

The Housemaid is an exceptional film that occupies

an important and special place in Korea film history.

So I believe this commentary will be very important to many Korean film lovers.

I don't watch same movies again and again,

even the ones I like. I watched this movie only

once a long time ago, and watched it again to prepare for the commentary.

-So I've watched it only twice. -I see.

I was worried that I might be disappointed with the movie.

But I was shocked when I watched it.

You saw it again this morning before we started recording the commentary.

I did.

The director Kim Ki-young made several great films, but

I wondered again how he was able to create this cinematic masterpiece.

And even among his great films, I realized again that

this film is really special.

The whole film is shot like the one in a picture frame.

Now the prologue part of the film is over.

And they are playing the game of cat's cradle.

I think this is a great backdrop for credits.

Yes.

It's great because the scene is simple and repetitive,

but I am curious why the director wanted to use it here.

Later, the film shows a cotton mill, so he may want to connect it

to making thread and weaving.

Yes, I think so.

But the wife in this house uses a sewing machine all the time,

and the film brings up the image of thread, cloth, and clothes.

-Which repeats. -Yes, it keeps repeating.

Cat's cradle is not an easy game to play because if you make

one wrong move, the thread becomes undone.

So he is bringing that...

That sense of tension.

We can guess that this game symbolizes risk,

or things that can come undone.

Also, building a house is important in this film.

Especially building a two-story house.

-It represents a desire of the middle class. -That's true.

It is a visual representation of that desire.

And the game of cat's cradle is like building a house.

-It is architectural in a way. -Yes.

The game can be difficult to play, but the patterns

repeat themselves.

So the game keeps going in circles.

It's not used as a metaphor, but it as a literal manifestation of that idea.

-Things going in circles is an image in the film. -Yes.

Here, she is spinning the sewing machine.

And they are spinning machines at the cotton mill.

Like fate that keeps going in circles without an exit.

Those are the ideas that I associated with the first image.

The maid, played by Lee Eun-sim,

just passed by in the scene.

I didn't know she showed up so early in the film.

When I watched the film for the first time, I didn't see her, but

watching it the second time, I realized she works at the mill.

But she doesn't show her face.

I'm guessing that she works at the cafeteria in the factory,

although it might not be the cafeteria.

-She looks like a cleaning woman. -She does.

So she is a character who does odd jobs at the mill.

The fact she is a cleaning woman means

-that even at the mill... -Yes.

Even in this textile factory,

people are divided into different classes.

I didn't know that was her because I couldn't see her face, but

she wears the same clothes when she moves into Dong-sik's house.

I see.

And there is a close-up scene with the mop, which seems unnecessary,

and the scene is repeated as if for emphasis.

It's obvious that the scene is in the film for a reason.

Yes.

And Kim Jin-kyu plays Dong-sik.

I searched for information about Kim Jin-kyu, and I found out that

he was 38 when he filmed this movie.

-But... -He looks older.

A Korean actor who is 38 now is

Won Bin.

Kim Jin-kyu was the same age as Won Bin when he filmed this.

It's hard to believe.

After playing Dong-sik in this film,

he was in Aimless Bullet the following year.

The two films have always been rated as

the top two films in Korean film history by film critics.

-Right. -The two films have competed for first place.

And he was in the top two films one after the other.

He was.

He was a great actor, and those were the best years that he had as an actor.

He was well known for the image of a gentleman and an intellect,

but he wasn't so highly educated in reality.

But in films, he often played intellectual characters,

-or incompetent fathers. -He did

In some ways, the character that he plays in this film overlaps

-with the character he plays in Aimless Bullet. -That's true.

But in The Road to Sampo, he plays a very different character.

This is the scene in which he finds a love letter.

But he reports it to the superintendent. He is a tattletale.

I thought this was a really unexpected and interesting way to start the story.

Dong-sik is a character with castration anxiety, and this loss of masculinity

is manifested in his fear of losing his job.

And telling the superintendent about the letter comes from that fear.

Yes.

He's afraid of the love letter growing into a scandal,

and that it would eventually cost him his livelihood.

-There is definitely that. -And at the same time,

he pretends to be a very ethical person when, in fact,

-he is very repressed. -That's true.

He could have just dismissed it.

And even the superintendent expresses her concern that

it might cause harm to the mill worker who wrote the letter.

And she asks whether he has to go to that extreme.

But he does something that makes him look like a prick

or some kind of puritan

who expects even other people to be morally impeccable.

But the way he behaves later on shows him to be the very opposite.

There is the maid again.

I see.

I was paying attention only to the stairs.

The stairs in this film symbolize one of its important thematic ideas.

-It's a spatial image. -Yes

So the film gives viewers a sneak preview of what is to come even here in the mill scene.

Director Kim Ki-young was called eccentric or idiosyncratic,

or a director with a taste for the grotesque,

or a show-off who likes to flaunt his style.

He was often described that way,

but when you watch his films, you realize they were made

based on meticulous calculations, which seem almost mathematical.

That is especially true in this film.

It is so true regarding the plot of the film as well as the cutting of the scenes.

For example, Director Ha Gil-jong once said that Kim Ki-young

was the Korean director who was most exact with scene cutting.

Director Ha said this some time in the 70s.

Director Kim had a near perfect sense when it came to

the camera angle or the size of the scene.

He was famous for that in Chungmu-ro.

-When I was just starting out in the industry, -Yes?

I used to ask everyone who had been in the field for a while

whether they ever had a chance to work with Director Kim.

Those who did unanimously said that he was a perfectionist,

and that he was always precise about where cameras should be.

He told the cameramen where their cameras should be

and gave them specific instructions on the size of the camera lens,

-whether 35 mm or 50 mm. -He did... I see.

And when they looked in their cameras, actors were exactly where they should be.

So like Hitchcock, Director Kim started making films after

he had learned everything there was to learn about cameras and camera lenses.

In the film, the set designs also play an important role.

People said that the director himself hammered nails in

in the sets for this film.

And the editing... the way he edited the film

is just amazing, even from today's point of view.

His editing choices were bold, and the story never drags even for a moment.

The story takes place inside one house, and with so much repetition, but

-there is not one moment of dullness. -Not one!

Nothing drags on.

And there are a lot of movements with cameras.

And he also used cranes a lot.

Now we are looking at the house before the family moves into it.

They are not well-off, and you see the piano and the sewing machine

together in one place. Like in his other movies, in which you find

conflicting character images or things that represent contradicting ideas,

in The Housemaid, you see the piano and the sewing machine,

which represent two different images.

If I were to have a different title for the film, it would be

The Piano and The Sewing Machine.

-Not only those two things... -Yes?

The film uses different pieces of furniture or one specific body part

over and over again, and it explores all possible interpretations of the images

by showing them in different contexts.

In the beginning of the film, everyone in the family is excited

about moving into their new house because

it means they are moving up, especially on the social ladder.

But their girl had polio, which left her lame.

The fact that she is lame brings a certain mood

into the film from the beginning.

-That is true. -The image of the family,

which seems perfect on the surface is offset

by their girl who is lame.

And the father is almost cruel to his own daughter.

Her younger brother, played by Ahn Sung-ki, treats her the same way.

She is treated with the same coldness and even meanness by her father

and brother. She is like the dirty laundry that the family wants to hide.

And this might sound very cruel but to her family, she is like a dirty stain.

They seem to think that their family would be

really perfect if only she wasn't lame.

Everyone in the family seems to think that.

Ahn Sung-ki was 11 at the time.

He was in another film by Kim Ki-young, called The Twilight Train

-two years prior to being in this one. -I see.

Ms. Kim Ji-mi also made her debut in The Twilight Train.

-There is the maid again. -Yes, that's her.

-Now I can tell just by looking at her back. -And her clothes, too.

-She has her hair braided. -She does.

This is really a strange scene.

This is where female mill workers change their clothes.

But Dong-sik just marches in I don't know what he thinks he is doing.

One of the recurring themes in this film seems to be about

-intrusion. -Right.

It can be a physical intrusion, or

-intrusions that are visual or auditory in nature. -I see.

The film seems to be making a declaration that it is about intrusions.

-Yes... -So it has a character that marches into a place like that.

What stands out in this scene is that

a man walks into a factory of all female workers.

What happens later is that the maid...

-Yes. -The maid walks into the house

-like some kind of virus. -Yes.

Which actually reminded me of your film, Thirst.

What really surprised me when I was watching the movie early this morning

was how it had sub- consciously influenced me.

I saw things that came across as being awfully familiar.

It was a really long time ago when I saw this film for the first time.

-And I forgot about it. -Yes?

I am notorious for being forgetful, so

I thought I didn't remember any of this film, but

it must have stayed somewhere in me, and without my being aware of it,

it must have influenced me when I made my movies,

like Thirst or Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance.

In Thirst, The Happy Hanbok Place is also a two-story,

-A two story building. -Right.

-And I have a character who wears traditional clothes. -Right.

And the clothes give viewers a similar feel as it does in this film.

Dong-sik's wife always wears a traditional dress.

And Ms. Um Aing-ran was just rising to stardom at the time.

Yes, that was the case.

By the time she made this film, it had been four years since she had debuted as an actress.

And this movie came out before her hit film, The Barefooted Young.

That's right.

She is the most fashionable character in the film.

And it's obvious she paid a lot of attention to what she wore in the film.

She was famous for her slender waist.

And she wears dresses that draw attention to her waist.

But what is unexpected is that

she does not change into that many different dresses.

In the beginning of the film, she wears the same dress,

and she doesn't change into a different dress for a long time.

You're right.

I thought about why, and I realized this film

simplifies and repeats images based on meticulous calculation.

You mean to create a sense of rhythm in the film.

Reading the reviews from the time when the film was released,

critics pointed out that the camera angle in the choir scenes

was too simple, and it is true,

since the scenes were filmed using the same exact camera angle

again and again. The street scenes in front of the house were also

shot from the same camera angle.

So the film is able to draw more attention to the changes

that take place by repeatedly presenting viewers with the same scenes

again and again. After that, the film slowly makes its way

to destroying what it has built up through the repetition.

Yes, the situation slowly gets worse as time passes.

The scene in which Dong-sik is giving Gyeong-hui a piano lesson

clearly shows the sexual tension between the two,

with their hands on top of each other.

You see similar tension when the maid is holding onto Dong-sik

with her hands clasped behind his back.

-Yes. -Those images are very closely connected.

But it also reminded me of a piano scene in my film, Stoker.

-I know which scene you mean. -It's almost eerie.

And here is the same angle in the choir scene.

What I also find interesting is the bust of Beethoven's head,

which is looking down on everything. And the same thing is in his house.

-Yes, there it is. -And later on, that also takes on

a very important meaning in the film.

It is used as a small prop that connects the choir room and his house.

I was thinking how important Gyeong-hui is as a character,

who is played by Ms. Um Aing-ran,

but throughout the film, this Gyeong-hui character

hides behind the other characters.

She persuades two other female

characters to approach Dong-sik, and

one of them ends up killing herself.

-The one called Gwak Seon-Yeong. -Yes.

And the other woman is the maid.

From Dong-sik's point of view, these two female characters

represent a displacement of his desire for Gyeong-hui.

-You mean more like a substitution for her. -Right.

Dong-sik is surrounded by too many women.

Um Aing-ran plays Gyeong-hui...

-Yes, she plays Jo Gyeong-hui. -It is really difficult

to understand why she does what she does in the film.

So she is secretly in love with Dong-sik but cajoles her friend to write him a love letter.

-And because of the letter, she ends up killing herself. -Yes.

And she talks her into working as a maid for Dong-sik's family.

Not only that, to get her to work as the maid for the family,

she gives her 1,000 hwan (the name of the previous Korean currency).

-Out of her own pocket. -Yes.

Why does she spend her own money to have the maid living in the house,

and what does she gain from it?

It is difficult to understand her motivation.

Since she works at a factory, she wouldn't have a lot of money,

but she takes private piano lessons,

which she has to pay for.

Is she ingratiating herself with the family by spending money on them,

or is she making the maid spy on the family for her?

But she doesn't ask the maid for information.

Gyeong-hui is a problematic character in the film.

If we were to look at the film from Dong-sik's point of view,

the target of his desire,

the one he really desires is

Jo Gyeong-hui.

For example, the day he has sex with the maid

is the day when he couldn't admit to himself his desire for Gyeong-hui.

He refuses to admit it, and that night, he is seduced by the maid.

-Yes. -Which leads to them having sex.

-And it is the day when they go to... -To the grave

of Gwak Seon-Yeong. So there are three women that he becomes involved with.

It is the night when he gets entangled with all three women.

It is a fateful night.

Yes.

On the other hand, he is a family man.

He is making curry rice, which back then was called rice curry.

Yes.

So this choice of food, that he is making none other

than rice curry, which is a Western food,

exemplifies a dream of the middle class,

a dream that is illustrated by the two-story house and the rice curry.

Yes, the dream

is represented by those images.

Many critics pointed out that when this film was made in 1960,

it had not been that long ago that the country had

gone through war, and the economy was starting to be rebuilt.

It had been seven years since the war.

Critics saw how this family tried so hard to climb up the class ladder.

The middle class was represented by a two-story house and a piano.

And also by food like rice curry.

But not many people actually belonged to the middle class; that was rare.

The people in this house wear shoes inside their house.

They do.

But Dong-sik's wife only wears a traditional dress, the Hanbok.

She is the one with the strongest desire for success.

-But she is also the most conservative one. -She is.

This picture-perfect family can be violent sometimes.

When it comes to scenes like this, I have to say that director Kim...

-This is when he wasn't at his best. -Yes.

It is awkward to see them very loving towards each other.

-You feel that way? -Yes, the way this scene was done seems very awkward.

The wife who wears a Hanbok all the time seems to symbolize

the attitude of the pre-modern.

It is the opposite of the character Gyeong-hui or the maid,

who wears modern clothes, not to mention the fact that

the maid smokes.

They represent the ambition of or for modernity.

But the clash between these two differences in time results

in a tragedy.

At the same time, it is very complicated.

There are only a handful of characters in the film.

And they all have different sides to them, so it is difficult

to pinpoint and say that one character represents tradition, and one represents modernity.

For example, the maid is from the countryside,

and she calls herself a second wife,

which shows that her ideas and attitude are very

old-fashioned, almost feudalistic.

The wife, on the other hand, wants to buy a television

and send their children to college.

She is the one who is pursuing that desire to be middle class.

If you think about it, the mistress is someone who is between a wife and second wife.

In Kim Ki-young's other film, Chungnyeo, the main character is a woman

whose mother was a second wife, and the film depicts in detail

the psychology of the main character, who is also fated to become a mistress.

The mistress character is a recurring one in Kim Ki-young's films,

which he built in different films that he directed.

-Yes. -The mistress character is a recurring character in his films.

Dong-sik just goes back and forth between the two women,

and his indecisiveness is summarize in one line later in the film

when he says, "There was nothing I could do."

Meaning that there was nothing he could do between his wife and his mistress.

Yes, and the maid comes into the house at the same time

when mice show up in the house.

The scene after that compares mice to squirrels.

The two animals are similar, but they are treated

very differently. One is the object of fear...

-While the other is the object of affection. -Yes.

They exemplify the difference between the two women.

And the film also suggests how one is truer to her instincts

while the other is socialized or trained.

How many families do you think there were that wore shoes inside their house?

-It was extremely rare. -Right.

And factory workers have time to

learn and sing in the choir.

They have a choir room and a teacher to teach them.

-A teacher paid by the company. -Yes, and he gets

paid enough to support his family of four.

And the factory workers are so well-dressed and Gyeong-hui

even gets private lessons. That all seems very unrealistic.

When you read books from the 60s or even from the time

of the Japanese colonial occupation, the dream of people from

the 1920s or 1930s always included a two-story house with a piano,

which for them represented

what modernity or modern life must be like.

There is something about the word, "maid," too.

Many young women who left their home in the countryside came to the city

and became factory workers or became kitchen maids called "sikmo."

Yes, they were called "sikmo," and the word "maid" was not used.

The word "maid” was not used even during the Joseon Dynasty, and

it was one of the words you would see in translation books.

Director Kim was famous for using literary expressions.

-He was. -So I think he used the word

intentionally, knowing that it was a very unfamiliar word.

And another reason that he wanted to use the word "Hanyeo" (maid),

besides the fact that it sounded very literary, must have been because

by using the syllable "ha," meaning low,

he wanted to bring a sense of spatialness to the word.

So it implies social class.

I think that is why he used the word "Hanyeo" instead of "sikmo."

Director Kim was known to have been very proud of

the titles he came up with for his films.

After The Housemaid (Hanyeo), he used the syllable "nyeo,"

meaning "woman," in many of his films.

-He did. -Yes.

-One of his films is titled Woman of Water (Sunyeo). -That's right.

"Su" meaning water.

There was a film called Evil Woman (Aknyeo), which he had been preparing

to shoot, but he passed away before he could even start filming it.

I think he came up with easy titles for his films,

rather than coming up with good titles.

You're right, because I really liked the title of his last film

that was released, Hunting for Idiots.

But I read an interview with Director Kim, in which he said

that he came up with the title because the film Declaration of an Idiot

and the song "Whale Hunting" were so popular at the time,

so he just put them together for his film title, and it surprised

many people when they heard his explanation.

The titles that I like are The Housemaid,

A Woman After a Killer Butterfly, and

Carnivorous Animal.

Aren't they cool titles?

They are, and you really like A Woman After a Killer Butterfly.

-I do. -That film is one of the strangest films that has ever been made.

It's hard to make any sense from that film.

-It's hard to figure out the story. -True.

The Housemaid is about a world that is very refined and

meticulously thought out, compared to his later films.

They were made under very different circumstances.

The films he directed later in career were produced

with a poor budget and in a limited time.

So Director Kim was not happy with the results.

He wasn't.

Then what is it about A Woman After a Killer Butterfly

that you like so much?

It's not that I like everything about the film, but

Director Kim filmed it under such terrible conditions, almost to the point

that he didn't care much about how the film ended up being,

so he didn't make the film to have a hit;

he made the film just to hand it over to the company.

Within the given time.

Because he made the film without being concerned about anything,

it actually shows to what extremes a director can go.

-You mean the film shows that. -Paradoxically,

the film shows what happens when the director just lets go.

So it is hard to tell where the story is going, and

each scene seems so disjointed.

It is a film that lets you enjoy a director's cinematic

imagination that is destructive and unbridled.

In this film, the maid seems to be

slightly slow.

-I am not sure. -Slightly.

I think you can see her that way, or see her as someone who is just weird.

She seems to go back and forth, which

leaves it to viewers to decide

what kind of person she is.

Sometimes she seems really sly, but

at other times she seems so naive, but

sometimes it seems every one of her actions has been calculated,

or maybe she is just acting out of impulse.

When the wife tells her to have an abortion,

she is so easily convinced by the wife.

And she really wants to depend

on the husband and the wife of the house.

She also comes across as someone who is very traditional, and

someone who think all she needs to have

-is the love of the husband. -She does.

But later in the film, she becomes afraid of being poisoned and replaces

the rat poison with sugar water, which shows how calculating she can be.

Yes, that part is very surprising.

Replacing the poison with sugar water is in Kim Ki-young's other films.

In Woman of Fire and also in Hwa-nyuh of 82.

-It's one of the recurring motifs... -Yes.

That the director uses.

Hwa-nyuh of 82 was the first Kim Ki-young film that I saw.

I saw it when it was released.

-In the theater? -Yes.

I was a freshman in college, and it was one of the two films

that motivated me to become a film director.

-The other film was Hitchcock's Vertigo. -I see.

-And Hwa-nyuh of 827? -Yes, Hwa-nyuh of 82.

So I saw his latest film first, like many other people.

-Many people of our generation did. -That's true.

It was the last remake of The Housemaid, which the director himself

made, and I ended up watching the original last.

I see.

The first Kim Ki-young film that I saw was Ban Geum-ryun.

-Really? -I was in middle school.

But I couldn't really understand the story.

Actually, I went to the theater to see something else playing at the theater at the time.

You know I was a middle school student at the time.

Well, it says so much about what kind of student you were.

She smokes a cigarette by breaking off the filter.

Do you suppose she does that

-to get a stronger taste? -or, she does it

to smoke it more slowly?

-The director was an ardent believer of Freud. -He was.

The way he uses the image of cigarettes in his films obviously

has s sexual meaning.

The way she breaks her cigarette into two seems very violent.

Yes, and because this film is from 1960, which seems like a part of

the 1950s, and in the 50s, men used the expression "apres girls"

to label women that they were attracted to and feared at the same time.

"Apres girls," meaning girls who presented an image of

of being unrestricted and free after the war,

which was also represented by the image of them smoking.

The maid is smoking when she makes her first appearance in the film.

We did see her mopping but...

Not counting those scenes...

You mean the first scene when we can see her face.

Another important scene is the last one, which seems to end

with a moral lesson, but in the last scene dong-sik smokes.

Because the last scene reminds viewers

of previous smoking scenes, it gives you an eerie feeling.

The first scene here in which the maid is in the closet,

she appears to be smoking. It had never been seen before in a film,

and it must have been shocking to the audience at the time.

It seems to flaunt the image of the femme fatale

that is hiding behind you.

It is not clear in the film, but I think it is possible to speculate

that Gyeong-hui is using cigarettes

as a way to control the maid.

-Yes, that seems possible. -And she has a line...

-She does. -She says the line that

there was a reason why she taught her how to smoke.

She is able to control her with one cigarette, which implies the hierarchical order...

-Or exploitation? -Yes.

The film is definitely making a statement about the class order

in the factory and in society.

That is true.

In the film, there is no sexual feeling between

Dong-sik and his wife.

There isn't, but still, you have a scene like the one we are looking at now.

The scene between him and his wife is depicted this way here,

but when you watch the two remakes of the original that Kim directed,

the wife tries really hard to seduce her husband.

Yes, but in this film, the wife is pregnant, so it seems

inappropriate to show any sexual feeling between them.

Yes, and the sexual feeling has been all given to the young women.

I am not sure if this room where the choir practices

is a studio or a movie set, or if they borrowed

an auditorium and dressed it up as a set,

but the wall is so...

The director decorated the wall in a bizarre way.

The house, too. Dong-sik's house has very strange patterns

on the wall.

In this scene, he covered the wall with cloth, but it is not a curtain,

and the cloth has creases. In this black and white film, without

any colors, the creases provide an accentuated sense of texture,

and it makes the scene visually enriching but also scary.

The visual design of the choir room seems to be

-very expressionistic. -It does.

It does give a very strong impression of being expressionistic.

With the lights, too.

The sequence of scenes seems very modern.

As soon as they hear the news that Gwak Seon-Yeong has died,

the camera marches straight to the corridor, the train whizzes by, and

they are already at her grave. The scenes move very fast and

very effectively, too. And at the grave, there is rain and lightning.

So the film sets the mood for the fateful night right away.

Yes, and the story takes place basically at two different places:

the two-story house

and the factory.

But this part of the film was shot on a real location, not on a set,

and the place is in the countryside.

The funeral was intentionally shot at this location and added in the film.

This scene shows where women like factory workers

and the maid come from.

-Yes. -What social background they have.

-In a way. -True.

The scene shows us that.

Here, you see Dong-sik's house, and the film repeatedly shows

that the house is next to the railroad.

When Gyeong-hui goes to the house, and Dong-sik is going back home,

the film always shows the railroad in the backdrop.

You can hear the train in the house, and it makes you think about

how the train carries young girls from the countryside

to the city.

It also makes you compare the train to the desire

that is speeding and heading towards its end.

And the train scene is also used to indicate a scene change

and to indicate that time has passed.

The train scene in the film seems to have

an image of regression rather than an image of moving forward

-when you look at the line of its movement. -Right.

So the train scene also symbolizes

an image of transgression.

Why do you think Dong-sik resisted Gyeong-Hui's seduction?

I think she is the girl that he desires most, but

Gwak Seon-yeong's death must have triggered a sense of fear in him,

and because the factory is his work place, any scandal

would lead to a detrimental result financially.

Yes, I thought about that, too.

And he is getting paid by Gyeong-hui for the lessons.

And because he works at the factory, he has become

entangled with Gyeong-hui

-in many ways. -He has.

This is the second funniest scene in the film.

This is like the worst soap drama, with the woman who is

-ripping her own clothes off. -All By herself.

While she is doing that, he is saying she should continue to come for her lessons.

Even at that moment, he is worried about money.

So he finally sends her away only to be faced with another temptation.

There she is without a bra,

and her hair is down for the first time.

Yes, she always had it braided until this scene.

The way Lee Eun-sim plays the maid character here by covering

her own breasts is just so ingenious.

The way she blinks her eyes seems so amazingly modern, too.

She seems embarrassed and so brazen at the same time

because she does it while staring at him.

She is covering her breasts, but not her nipples.

In the next scene, she is covering her nipples, but

when you really think about it, covering them seems

more provocative than not covering them.

This scene is also similar to a scene in Thirst. In the scene, the actress,

-Kim Ok-bin says, "I'm very shy." -She does.

In that scene, she says it while touching her breasts.

-And there is another scene with a cigarette. -Yes.

This scene is also up to interpretation.

This is one of the most important scenes in the film.

The way she rolls her eyes like that.

-Her acting... -It's impressive.

She must have acted following the director's suggestions.

-Don't you think? -Yes, I think so.

Kim Ki-young was a director who had to have

his way about everything.

-The scene here... -Yes?

When I saw it for the first time, I thought when he touched the maid,

he had succumbed to the maid's seduction, but when I saw it a second time,

I realized that might not be the case.

He is trying to leave, but

she blocks the window and closes it. She is blocking him.

So he is actually pushing her away

to get her out of his way. It could be the reason

why he touched her.

So he touches her, but the maid squeezes her arms

with his hands under her armpits

as if she has put handcuffs on him.

After she makes sure that he can't move,

she puts her feet on top of his shoes.

Even at that point, Dong-sik looks like he wants to leave.

The maid's seduction is much more aggressive than I remembered,

and Dong-sik just gets dragged into the next situation.

It made me think that maybe I was influenced by this film

because in my films Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Thirst,

there are scenes in which a woman's arm and legs are

wrapped around a man's body.

In Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, there is a scene in which a girl

has her legs tightly around her father like the one in this film.

Most of the male characters in Director Kim's films are

incompetent and indecisive.

They are not the bread- winner of their family,

and they often depend

on their wife financially.

In comparison, the wives in his films have very specific jobs.

For example, the main female character in Woman of Fire and

Hwa-nyuh of 82 own a chicken farm.

In this film, the wife makes clothes with her sewing machine.

But the husband in Kim's films is either an artist or

an intellectual of some sort.

-That is often the case. -Yes.

So the man claims to be an artist, but

-all he does is create trouble. -He does.

In this film, the husband gives the impression of being

incompetent, indecisive, and inept, but

if you watch the film more carefully, he proves to be quite violent, too.

-He beats up the women. -Quite often, yes.

Especially Gyeong-hui and the maid in this film.

-But he doesn't touch his wife. -No.

In this film, when he slaps a woman,

she falls flat on the floor, which creates, again,

the spatial image of who is on top and who is on the bottom.

And the camera angle has the man looking down and the woman looking up.

Yes, and the house is also structured that way.

The maid's room and the husband's piano are on the second floor.

The wife's sewing machine is on the first floor, and the first floor is

contrasted to the second floor. And the space that the two women

share is the kitchen.

And you can't tell where the children's rooms are

even if you watch the movie very carefully.

Later in the film, when the husband is forced to sleep

in the maid's room, the girl sleeps

with her mother.

-After the boy dies. -Yes.

Until that point, the film doesn't let you know where the children sleep.

When they were building the second floor and shooting the scenes there,

they must have considered the line of movement a lot.

Now, the maid moves into the veranda to peep into the next room,

and that line of her movement is very important.

The film does not show you where this house is located, but

watching some scenes shot on location, I believe they found a house

that they already had in mind, and with that as the model,

they must have built the set accordingly.

When they looked for a possible model for the house,

they must have known exactly what they wanted

because the maid's room is connected to Dong-sik's room

not from inside the house, but from the outside.

So they can go into the rooms through the door, but they can

also go in or peep inside through the window.

And the film uses this layout to the maximum.

That's right, and there are so many scenes shot from outside of the window.

And by using those mis-en- scenes in the film,

it shows how

trapped these characters feel.

The tracking shot was used to show the connection between

the two rooms, or to show a movement that either

goes forward or backward.

But the tracking shot scenes that show how the two rooms are connected

are really impressive.

And they are emphasized in the film.

The scene here, to me, is almost like a fly in the ointment.

It is not really necessary, and

it also is not interesting.

The film wants to show how lost Dong-sik feels

by putting him outside the house in a changed scenery.

For me, this scene and the taxi scene that follow

-reminds of a scene from Aimless Bullet. -I know which scene you mean.

-Especially the taxi scene here. -You're right.

The driver says, "He came into my cab like an aimless bullet”

And like in Aimless Bullet, there isn't a place that he wants to go to.

He says, "Take me anywhere."

He does.

The bartender shaking the bottle like that, don't you think it has a meaning?

It does have a lot of sexual meaning.

The acting here can be seen as a bit conventional.

Their lines are also a bit awkward and so is their acting.

Back then, directors must have had tremendous difficulty

shooting sex scenes.

The film showed her feet when she stepped on his shoes.

-You mean her bare feet. -Yes.

Things like that enable viewers to feel and imagine so much more.

We know how Hitchcock got away

with censorship from so many examples.

Director Kim also overcame censorship by using

very creative images that are compact with meaning.

In a way, censorship made them more creative.

-By having restrictions. -Right.

In Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, when Marilyn Monroe

kisses Tony Curtis,

-he spreads his legs up in the air. -He does.

A scene like that illustrates the physical reaction that is

happening to the man, in an indirect way.

Everything in this film is so compact with meaning,

with everything being calculated and nothing that is unnecessary,

so the slight inadequacy in the bar scene that we just saw

seems to stand out.

I think it's because other scenes are so exceptional that

the bar scene seems like it was an extra attached to the film.

-You mean like an additional modifier. -Yes.

Now we find out that the maid is pregnant.

If you were to look at Woman of Fire and Hwa-nyuh of 82,

which were Kim Ki-young's own remakes of The Housemaid,

and Carnivorous Animal, which is considered to be the remake of

-Chungnyeo... -Carnivorous Animal, yes.

In all five films, the man is

like a territory, and two women are standing on

opposite sides and are engaged in a serious battle

over the territory, while the man just waits for

them to decide what they are going to do with him.

That's right, but what is funny is that the man is just a territory,

but he thinks he is reigning over these women.

He holds on to to his desire to rule over the women.

Dong-sik seemed to be just a music teacher who teaches

the choir and gives piano lessons, but here he has a pencil

in his hand while playing the piano.

-He is a composer. -We find out now that

he is a composer.

In the director's other films after this one, the husband continues

-to be a composer. -He does.

The wife's job changes, but the husband is always a composer.

That's right.

The biggest difference between The Housemaid and Woman of Fire

and Hwa-nyuh of 82 is that in this film, the maid seduces the man,

but in the other two films, the women are raped by the man.

That is a big difference.

All the doors in this house are

sliding doors.

Which is different from the houses from this time, and

they also contribute to making this scene quite unique.

The patterns on the wall look like a spider's web or a beehive.

They do.

And the sliding doors really capture the psychology of the characters

in this small space

very effectively.

If the doors were not sliding but hinged, you would have a problem

with the camera angle if you wanted to show

a person behind or by the door.

But with sliding doors, it is a matter of how much you have the door

open to show the person behind it, even from the front angle.

That's so right.

Also, when actors open or close a door, they have a very limited space,

but once they push a door open, the space opens up for them to act in.

-Or when they pull a door open. -Yes.

But with the doors in this film, you just have to slide them open.

So the actors can close or open them really fast, or they can stand

very close to each other with only the door between them.

Without any unnecessary movement.

So when you slide it closed, the open space suddenly

becomes like a wall.

You saw white women dancing on TV, which has

now changed into a doll that looks like a white woman.

This scene is related to dreams that many Koreans had

at the time, the people who were not a part of the middle class.

We mentioned the symbolic meaning of curry rice.

-Yes. -And also the meaning of a two-story house.

And a piano.

That, too.

They are all related.

One of the things that Director Kim was very concerned with

-was the lighting in the film. -Right.

If you take a closer look at the lighting, you do see problems.

For example, where is the source of the light?

And you can see that the director used the lighting the way he wanted.

Even in scenes done in broad daylight,

you see several shadows of a character at once,

sometimes two or three shadows at a time, which makes

-no logical sense. -No.

So you see that sometimes in his films,

but it is obvious that Director Kim was more interested in

-illustrating characters' emotions. -You mean with the visual effect of lighting.

Yes, that was more important to him.

And he also had a very keen sense when it came to discovering new actors.

He did.

He usually had star actors in his films.

He did, but at the same time, he always found

new faces for important roles in his films.

He did.

Lee Eun-sim, who played the maid in the film, and Yoon Yeo-jeong,

-for example... -And Lee Hwa-si.

Ah, Lee Hwa-si.

-The legendary actress. -Yes.

He discovered all these actresses.

Even Park Jung-ja.

For the first time.

Kim Ji-mi, too.

-And Moon Hee, too. -That's right.

-He was the one who discovered these actresses. -He discovered

talented actresses who went on to become stars, and

he was famous as a director who made actresses into stars.

It's hard to imagine now, but Kim Ki-young was a director

who produced box office hits.

According to records, he was the one who directed the biggest

box office hits in 1971 and 1972.

They were Woman of Fire and Chungnyeo.

Everyone in our parents' generation knew him, and they all knew

his films, such as The Housemaid, Woman of Fire, and Chungnyeo.

And his last film, which was released in 1984, and

we often talk about how he and his films were rediscovered

at BIFF in 1997.

You wonder how this director, who produced cinematic masterpieces,

could become so forgotten in the course of 13 years.

In some aspects, he did it to himself

by making B-movies after

his film Transgression.

I really liked some of his films that he made after this one,

but critics and the media turned their backs on his films,

and he also slowly became forgotten by the audience.

And wasn't he famous for being eccentric and

not caring at all about how people in the industry thought of him?

-Well, there are legendary stories about him. -True.

He was famous for saying he was the only one who had the answer,

or that he cooked beef in secret and ate it all by himself.

You saw the scene in which the wife, played by Ju Jeung-nyeo,

throws the TV and sewing machine. She was one of the top actresses at the time.

According to records that I had found, she was the owner of

a film production company under her own name two or three years before making this film.

-Really? -Yes, in the 50s.

So she was an actress who also had power in the production aspect.

She was one of the most popular actresses at the time, and

even compared to Lee Eun-sim, her acting is just as intense.

True.

Towards the end of the film, she is scarier than other characters.

She is.

The wife is the character who goes through

the biggest changes in the story.

Compared to her indecisive husband, she makes the important

decisions at crucial moments.

Sometimes her decisions seem criminal or sometimes she uses persuasion,

-but she knows almost instinctively... -She does.

That she has to survive.

And in order to survive, she makes swift decisions.

And in the director's series of films, the one who survives is the wife.

Yes.

In the scene we have here...

She looks so delicate and pretty.

She is walking up the stairs in a white ramie dress with the light

shining on her from the side, and when she lifts her skirt like that,

she looks as if she is about to dance.

She goes up to the second floor, and the contrast here is quite grotesque.

The wife in a pretty white dress is standing next to the maid, who is

banging on the piano.

Lee Eun-sim was only 19 at the time.

I believe she was in one other film before making this one.

But after getting so much attention for this film,

she didn't make that many movies after it.

-She was in a few movies. -Two or three, I believe.

And we have only the titles of those movies.

Another aspect of this film that surprises us

is the way it uses sound.

Considering Korean films at the time, this film definitely stands out

for its visual aspect, and at this time, people did not pay much

attention to sound; however, in this film, the sounds are

loaded with meanings.

There is the sound of the sewing machine,

the sound of the piano, and the sound of the train passing by,

or the sound of the girl walking up the stairs with crutches.

There is also the creaking sound from the stairs.

And later, the film has the sound of the maid's head banging on the stairs.

That is the most shocking sound.

And these sounds are all part of the narrative, meaning that

Director Kim did not finish filming the movie and then thought about

how to mix the sound by trying different means of editing.

-He knew from the beginning. -From the beginning, it was done as planned.

-He had a definite plan how to use sound. -He did.

For example, in the scene in which the husband confesses that he had an affair.

And the woman is pregnant. The wife asks, "Who is the woman?"

-And you hear the sound of the piano. -You do.

When they hear the banging on the piano from upstairs,

the wife says, "So she is the one.”

So they don't have to talk more about it.

We have another crucial scene here.

On the top of the stairs, she stands there as a scary

silhouette, in spite of the fact that she is out of focus.

If you think about it, this is the most important scene in the film.

-But they close the door. -They do.

They only allude to what is about to happen, and you only hear the sound.

And when they open the door, you see the famous scene shot from above.

It is the famous scene.

The characters and the camera move backward, and the door

is closed to create more space.

The line is drawn between the two different classes of people.

-Yes, the camera shows the outside again. -It really is one of the best scenes ever.

It is.

I remember seeing similar scenes in Woman of Fire

and Hwa-nyuh of 82.

It is so cleanly done, without losing any of the shocking impact.

It makes you imagine by not showing it to you.

-It is so elegantly done. -It is.

This scene in which Dong-sik is carrying the maid upstairs later becomes

the scene in which she is clinging to his leg.

-As they come down. -It makes a contrast.

The way they enter the room is really similar to

the way the maid dies at the end.

And here, Kim Jin-kyu's acting is just superb.

He looks so sick and tired and doesn't know what to do.

-He must hate himself so much. -And wondering how he

got himself in this mess.

My wife laughed so much at this scene.

When you think about it, the most important year in Korean

film history was the year between the April Revolution in 1960

and the May Coup in 1961.

In Hollywood, they consider the most important time in the Hollywood

film industry to be between 1939 and 1940, when films like

Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Citizen Kane came out.

In Korea, the masterpieces by the so- called three most

important directors were all made in 1960:

this film, Mother and a Guest,

and Aimless Bullet.

The maid is coaxed by the wife to abort her baby, which

the maid carries out almost immediately.

She does.

The story moves so fast that viewers might feel uneasy.

What makes Kim Ki-young's films so interesting is the fact that

they are so unpredictable.

That's true.

And his films become more and more so.

His later films, you mean.

The story keeps heading towards somewhere which seems unimaginable,

but as viewers follow the story, they will ask themselves

what they would have done if they were in the character's position.

What would one do if he was seduced like Dong-sik?

Then, you get to understand, caught between the two women,

how he just doesn't know what to do. The film is

able to draw out sympathetic reactions from its viewers.

So the story is not so preposterous, and it makes viewers

identify with the characters. Compared to films from its time,

however, it takes the story in a very different direction.

When the wife is walking up the stairs, she passes the maid

as if she is looking at a cockroach. She is afraid that

her dress might touch her.

It looks very cruel.

The wife treats the maid the way she reacted to seeing the mouse in the house.

She does.

What's interesting about the scene is that it ends

without any sense of conclusion.

The maid is crying and clinging onto the wife,

the wife is screaming out, "Honey, honey, help me!"

And the husband is just pulling his hair out.

The scene just ends without showing how everything ends.

And there is the sound of a train passing by.

And it is a loud sound.

The sound is overlayed onto the scene.

So the maid loses her baby, but

the wife gives birth to her baby.

That's what happens.

The maid is resentful because they care so much about their baby

while she was forced to kill her own baby.

Yes, that is really scary.

That is what makes this film so scary.

And it is known that this film is based on a real story.

-Did it happen in Gimcheon? -Yes.

There was a real murder of a five-year-old boy. A woman

who was involved with a man drowned his son.

And this film is based on that real murder.

This is another strange scene because it is just chaotic

in the house, and in the midst of it, the wife gives birth,

but the husband was out while his wife was having their baby.

And he comes back home as if it were no big deal,

and you wouldn't think that he would pay more attention

to his pet than to his own baby.

He comes into the room and doesn't even look at his wife.

This is a scene that makes you wonder

what's going on in his head.

Kim Ki-young occupies such an important place in

Korean film history because before him,

films were considered simply as a vehicle for a story,

meaning films were just another way to tell a story.

-Only a means to tell a story. -Yes.

But Kim is very important in film history because his films began

from ideas that were so divergent from that understanding of films.

You cannot say that this is a realistic film.

This film is definitely different from other films from that time,

but you cannot say that it completely disregards the logical coherence

of the story.

In that aspect, what do you think about those points

in Kim's films that could have been smoothed out, but

are shown in a quite crude manner?

Sometimes I do feel that he did go slightly overboard in his films,

but at least in The Housemaid, although he does tell a violent story,

it really doesn't have that many logical problems

compared to his other films.

The children in this film are also interesting.

They are not like normal children in other films.

Especially the boy.

The boy, played by Ahn Sung-ki, is really mean and ill-mannered.

-He is a terrible boy. -He really is.

But the way he is depicted might be close to how boys are at that age.

There are some boys who are like him.

How realistic the boy should be portrayed was up to the director,

but if you look at it from a class difference,

even the children have no respect for the maid.

They use her, but at the same time, they are afraid of her.

They have an unreasonable fear of the maid

from the beginning, saying she would use the rat poison on them.

You wonder why they are so afraid of her, and

why they think she is such a person of importance in the house.

And it is not about who is nice and who is bad.

The boy seems meaner, and the girl seems as if she would

understand the maid, but she doesn't at the end.

And she says let's not deal with someone who is crazy.

You can see how hostile these children are

towards the maid.

The way the femme fatale is treated in this film is

different from other film noir.

Of course, because this is not a film noir.

The way this film sees the maid character is...

how should I put it...

-it is very ambiguous. -It is.

The film sees her as someone who should be vanquished.

Like a villainess.

On the other, it really takes a deeper look into the character.

Yes, the film makes you sympathetic towards her after she loses her baby.

It is also because the people in the house are just as mean and evil.

True.

They do become more and more evil.

The man makes her have a baby and the woman makes her lose that baby.

Makes her lose the baby.

-It's such a famous line. -It is.

Because the film sums it up so nicely for viewers, they have no choice

but to nod their heads and say that it is true.

And the way Kim Jin-kyu acts in the scene is quite vicious.

Looking like a character from a gangster film, he comes in

with his eyes cast on the floor, and suddenly he slaps her.

And usually when people slap someone,

their hand comes from the outside and goes in, but

he slaps her from inside out.

-So the way his hand snaps looks strange. -It does.

And they leave her like that when she has been starving for

three days, and bleeding, too.

After they force to lose her baby,

they make her eat like a cat eating trash on the street

or a mouse in the sewer.

By showing her in that state, the film confuses viewers

as to which character they should identify with,

and who they should side with.

An angle like that is impossible in real life.

Because there is a wall behind the cupboard.

We use scenes like that one nowadays when we are

shooting someone opening a refrigerator or microwave.

The director used it in this film.

He was not hesitant at all to use a camera angle like that.

The scene in which the maid is carrying the water is really strange, too.

-It is a very intense scene. -It is.

I think this scene was probably influenced by Hitchcock.

Or Akira Kurosawa.

I'm sure he was also influenced by Japanese films, too.

Like Shohei Imamura.

According to records, there was no director who knew film

trends better than Kim Ki-young at the time.

I'm sure.

People in Korea did not have many opportunities to watch Japanese films.

Especially compared to American and European movies that were released.

Director Kim lived in Japan for a couple of years.

-He did. -And he was fluent in Japanese.

He went to Japan even in the 90s to

watch films.

The story is so twisted here. It makes you think about

how the director is seeing this maid.

She causes the boy to die, but she doesn't kill him by feeding him

the rat poison. He thinks she did, so he becomes so shocked that

he runs down the stairs and dies.

It seems the director did not want to make the maid

into a complete monster.

That's true, and the one who really carries out her plan to murder

the maid is actually the wife.

-She does. -She puts the rat poison in the soup.

The maid only plays a game with the poison.

She scares the boy by drinking the water and spitting it back out.

But in the director's remakes of this film, the boy is actually thrown

by the maid and is killed.

She does.

When you think about the scene, you can see how Im Sang-soo

was also very influenced by Kim Ki-young.

-Like that scene in... -Yes, of course.

In A Good Lawyer's Wife,

there is the scene in which a boy is killed.

And Im Sang-soo also directed a remake of The Housemaid.

He did.

Now viewers might wonder

where the story is going to go now.

The boy just falls down from the stairs and dies.

He does.

When you think that this must be the ending,

the wife says let's not do anything about their boy's death.

For me, this is the strangest part

of the story.

She just saw her own boy die in front of her eyes, but

she tells her husband not to report it and to go on to work

because if he gets fired, they won't be able to make a living.

Holding her dead son and looking like the statue of Pieta

with tears in her eyes, she looks up to the camera upstairs,

and she delivers that line which doesn't seem possible.

It really is a very, very strange turn in the story.

But if viewers were able to follow the story up to this point,

-they should be able to understand her decision. -True.

Because her character has been set up that way,

viewers are able to accept her decision here.

As always, everything is connected to desire and money

in Kim's films, and even in this twist of the story,

the connection to money is emphasized.

This film is really compulsive.

It keeps on using the stairs,

the doors are slid open and closed, and it continues to use

the recurring tracking shots,

and the piano and other props.

They are repeated to the point that you could get

-tired of them. -They are repeated again and again.

They are repeated, but

they are not boring or monotonous.

They are meticulously calculated to fit in perfectly

into different situations. The eye contact doesn't work here.

Dong-sik looks in a different direction.

It's no big deal, though.

Their eyes do not meet.

In this film, you see mice, but in Kim's remakes of this film,

he uses chickens.

He uses mice and chickens.

The wife's leg has pins and needles, but the Korean expression

uses the word "mouse"” to describe it. And it happens

because she worked too hard on the sewing machine.

So you have a scene in which the husband massages her leg.

-It is a funny scene. -Slightly funny, yes.

The director must have chosen mice or chicken because

they symbolize fertility.

Fertility or virility is connected to the sexual desire

in his films.

Now you see the girl planning to harm

the maid.

It could be because the maid caused the boy to die.

I don't know who played this girl character, but

she was really cast well for the role.

Her face is not a face of a girl, and her expressions, too.

She looks like a woman except that her body is small.

She garners sympathy because she limps, but

she always looks sad, which plays a key role

in making this family

look very unstable.

She is the one who makes the family look

unstable from the very beginning of the film.

Now the relationship between the maid and the wife

-has reversed. -It has.

And it shows how it became reversed.

And you don't get to see a man who is that pathetic.

Dong-sik doesn't decide to go to the maid's room,

or because he is sexually drawn to the woman.

He goes up because his wife tells him to go up.

-So he goes up. -He does.

Throughout the entire film, he only makes one decision on his own,

which is to die together with the maid.

-Even then... -That is the only one.

Even then the maid tells him that

-he has to die with her. -If not, she says

she will kill his wife. So he makes a decision.

But he was pushed to even make that decision.

The maid says to choose whether he should die or his wife.

You can say he does make a big decision to end his life,

but he was forced to decide.

This reversal of power in a relationship between one man

and two women is often introduced in Kim's films.

In Chungnyeo, for example, the wife lets her husband

stay with a prostitute] mistress to cure his impotency,

and to do that, she even buys the mistress a house.

The wife does.

But at a certain point in the story, the two women decide to share

the man, one has him before midnight and the other after midnight.

You can always find a moment like this one in Kim's films.

This is also a very bizarre scene.

She bites him on his shoulder.

And later she covers him with her hair.

She covers his face with her hair.

She has her legs wrapped around his legs.

It's hard to figure out the meaning of her actions.

They are really bizarre.

She looks like a snake.

Or, the image seems to say that by covering him with her hair,

she wants to devour him and be one with him.

In that scene, even the legs of the chair give you a powerful impression.

They do.

She looks like she is about to eat him.

Or, she is trying to cover up his humiliation.

If you take it further, you can get to images in a vampire film.

Now the bizarre scene cuts to the handle of the sewing machine.

What Kim does in a scene like this one is that

when characters have a change of mind, they don't say it out loud,

but instead, they perform a specific action, like

holding the scissors in this case.

He tries to show you the changes that are taking place

in his characters through these actions.

-But she doesn't use the scissors. -She doesn't.

What is so carefully done here is that when the wife

wants to kill the maid, she can't find the rat poison.

But when she looks for either salt or pepper and opens the cupboard,

she finds the rat poison sitting there.

That's when she decides again to kill her.

It also gives you the impression that it was fated that way.

The rat poison wasn't there because the maid took it.

It was used to kill the squirrel, and then

it was switched.

Unlike the sliding doors in the house, you have to pull the door

of the cupboard, which gives you a different feeling altogether.

It does.

I didn't think about it before, but it really does.

The fear in this film is created by things

you drink or eat.

-Things you can't do without. -You have to eat and drink.

Right.

Because it makes it scary for you to eat or drink,

the fear seems so primal and real.

There is a scene in which the children refuse to eat for two days,

and the maid feeds them rice by force.

In films from other countries...

This scene here...

Yes...

It's such a strange scene.

It's like a scene from a Hitchcock or De Palma film.

They are a mother and a daughter.

-They are not hostile to each other. -They are on the same side.

And they want the same thing.

But the girl's stare...

The wife has to carry out her plan to kill the maid

while her daughter is watching her, and the sense of guilt that this must create...

It is so surprising to see a scene like this one in a Korean film from 1960.

Also, the scene in which the maid takes the girl's father to her room

-in front of her. -Again, in a movie from 1960.

That is quite shocking, too.

The girl looks pleadingly at her father and tells him not to go with the maid.

But the wife tells him to go.

And the girl says, "Dad, but don't drink the water."

She does.

That is the moment when you are not sure whether

you should laugh or cry.

The scene in which I laughed really loudly was when the maid

calls him "Honey" out of the blue after having sex.

She calls him "Honey," but the man is so startled, and he says

"Don't call me anything!"

She calls herself Dong-sik's second wife, and he doesn't know

what to do with her, which just makes you laugh.

It really is a scary moment.

A nightmarish moment for any married man.

But it can make the audience laugh.

The positioning of the characters and the way they are dressed

are making a clear contrast here.

Yes.

The maid is the only one in a black dress.

Here, the maid is making a case: at least the wife has the hope

of saving her husband and her family.

However, the maid doesn't have even that.

It makes you nod your head.

The wife has everything to lose.

Right.

But the maid has nothing to lose now.

Which is why they are able to go at each other.

Now, the wife is obsessed with working at her sewing machine.

In Kim's films, you have men who are dominated by

and dependent on their wife's

financial ability.

Some see that as a projection of

Kim's own personal relationship with his wife.

People do talk about that, but there is really

-no way for us to know for sure. -It really was between them.

Kim's wife was a dentist.

Yes.

And she was financially responsible for the family.

And Kim only cared for his vision of art.

He did.

She provided for him.

And people say that they were very happy in their marriage.

Yes.

It was a tragedy, but they did

pass away together.

There are those things on the table and the piano.

-You see scenes like this one often in this film. -We do.

A scene like this one really exudes the feel

of a horror film.

It is also because of the music.

He could have used other music here, but he consistently uses

similar, horror-sounding music that uses only horn instruments,

percussion, and piano. And he rarely uses

string instruments.

He really doesn't use string instruments.

The music is really unnerving.

The music does not hesitate to shock you.

The maid made a threat to the children and made it look like

she would feed them with poison, but she doesn't.

She didn't do that to the boy.

Or to the girl.

The film seems very violent and cruel, and

the maid really seems like a villainess, but in spite of all that,

you do feel for her.

It is a film that maintains a sense of integrity by

portraying the characters with a sense of humanity.

According to records, this film as well as Woman of Fire

were such big hits at the time, and the audiences were so engrossed

with the films that they screamed in the middle of them,

-"Kill that bitch!" -Yes, I read that, too.

That it happened very often.

Many middle-class families at the time had a maid.

So there were many similar cases as the story of this film.

I'm sure there were.

And the expression "second wife" wasn't so odd at the time.

I'm sure many women in the audience had an instinctive

fear of it.

I found this scene sad.

Looking at this scene, the maid here has no thought of killing herself.

She is eating because she wants to live, and because of this scene,

it becomes quite sad

when she finally decides to kill herself.

At crucial moments in the film, it always rains.

The night when Dong-sik succumbs to the maid's seduction,

lightning strikes a tree.

-Yes. -And the smoke from the tree

symbolizes the sex between the two.

This is another strange scene.

What I find most interesting about the film is the way it uses

the character Gyeong-hui.

The maid really feels this intense jealousy not towards the wife,

but towards Gyeong-hui.

I think there is even a saying about that...

The maid used to call her, "Sister," but she doesn't anymore.

This is the last time we see Gyeong-hui.

Yes.

The way Gyeong-hui leaves the scene is quite interesting, too.

The maid brings cigarettes when she didn't have to, and

she reminds her of the memories related to cigarettes.

Like the way the wife grabbed the scissors, the maid drops the plates,

and one of them breaks, and

-now she has a knife in her hand. -And it gives her

ideas, which she carries out.

-If the plates didn't break... -Right...

Following the logical process of the scene...

-And that awkward way she re-enters the room. -With her body lowered.

We saw the bars in the window in the tracking shot, and

she looks like a predator.

Like a Carnivorous Animal from one of Kim's film titles.

The scene which shows the characters this close up is the first in this film.

Before this, we saw a possibility of the family continuing

their life as if they have somehow come to terms

with their positioning in the power balance, but

this is the moment when that is shattered.

-The tension is reignited. -It is.

Now it is heading towards an end that cannot be reversed.

Gyeong-hui is injured and runs away from the house.

She could be going to the police or

to the factory and say what took place at Dong-sik's house.

So they would have to face it somehow.

Right.

They even hid the cause of their son's death,

and tried so hard to hide the maid as the family secret,

but now it might be

known to the outside.

Which is why the director had the close- up scene on the maid's face.

-The closest one in the film. -Right.

So there was a reason why

that the scene that shows the characters this close up was necessary in the film.

What is difficult to understand here is...

Aren't those shadows just fantastic?

What is difficult to understand here is why the maid

is looking at Beethoven's bust as she is dying.

Is she looking at it just to show that she is dying by

how the bust becomes blurry?

Or, is Beethoven's bust a prop that symbolizes

the fact that this is a middle- class family with an artist father

and that this family is familiar with Western culture?

Is that a prop that symbolizes all those ideas?

But you see it becoming blurry as the maid looks at it here.

Yes.

The maid is told not to touch the piano, but

she keeps pestering him to teach her the piano.

When she first comes into the family, she says she wants

to learn how to sew from the wife.

But at some moment, she says she wants to learn the piano

like Gyeong-hui.

In short, she is expressing her desire for something that she shouldn't desire.

And that something is symbolized by Beethoven,

which is why she sees the bust while being choked.

But you see the traditional masks

-above the piano. -Yes, there are a couple of them.

The masks used in the mask dance.

Do you think the director used them to create an eerie feeling?

I don't know. There are dolls in the room, too.

Yes, there are a lot of things in this room.

The scene shows Dong-sik's arms hanging helplessly like that

from the window. It is pouring rain and his arms look so helpless.

It is a scene that

-visually summarizes the film. -Visually, it does.

That one image.

Now is the climax of the film.

Yes.

Up to this point, the audience is wondering whether the poison is real.

The maid could have switched it with sugar water.

She switched it once so why not a second time.

So that could be poison or not, and she said to drink it together,

-but she could drink it alone. -Right.

If one of them doesn't drink it, who would it be?

She already used this trick with the children.

So the audience must be remembering that it happened before.

They were tricked a couple of times in the film.

Viewers have to watch this scene wondering

whether they are really drinking the poison

or if both of them would drink it.

If we were to think about it, wouldn't we think

that the maid would drink it first?

I did, too, but

-in the film, it is the opposite. -Right.

So viewers now would think she is not going to drink it.

She is such a cunning woman.

Now Dong-sik talks to the maid as if

-he understands her for the first time. -He does.

And what the film has developed up to this point, the tricks

that she has played and the turns and twists in the story, is coming together.

What the maid says here is really inconsistent.

She says she wants to live with him forever in heaven.

But she also says what good is happiness when you are dead.

You can be happy only when you're alive.

So she ends up contradicting what she said before.

It's like the last line in your film, Thirst.

It is.

And a moment later she says if they are not together now,

she won't be able to have him even in heaven, so

she tries to stop him

from going to his wife.

She seems to be just rambling.

Their hands clasped...

It is one of the most impressive scenes in the film.

They have to unclasp their hands for her to give him a cigarette.

In the film, the image of hands is very important.

Like the hand that turns the sewing machine.

The hand that holds a smoke or plays the piano.

And finally the hands that are clasped.

The night when they had sex for the first time, her hands were clasped

behind his back. Her hands look so determined, like the hands

of the famous Nongae, who killed a Japanese general by clasping

her hands around him and jumping to their death.

The clasped hands manifest the joining of their desires.

As in the case when Gyeong-hui is taking her piano lesson.

Yes. That image was inserted in the scene.

Now he pushes her hand away.

That motion...

If it wasn't directed by Kim, that would have looked comical.

He looks like he is giving up.

She looks so desperate and sad as she tries to hold his hand for the last time.

But he pushes her hand away like that.

He seems so heartless and cruel.

In the film, the image of hands symbolizes desire.

It does.

In that sense, the image is indicative of his desire.

She is holding onto his neck.

And later she clings onto his leg.

She says, "If I let you go now, I won't be able to find you in heaven."

From the maid’s point of view, it really is a heart-wrenching line.

-You see the shadow... -Yes, the shadow.

On the ceiling.

You see the same scene in Hwa-nyuh of 82.

I saw that film in a huge theater with only a handful of people,

and there was the same scene in which the woman was

dragged down the stairs with her head banging

on every step of the stairs. In Hwa-nyuh of 82, the house

is bigger, so the banging sounds echoed louder.

And because the technology for sound effects was better

than the time when The Housemaid was made, it sounded

more realistic, that banging sound on the stairs.

It looked more dangerous for Na Young-hee, who played the maid

in Hwa-nyuh of 82, and it must have hurt her head when filming it.

Watching it, you can also feel the pain on your own head.

-The acting here is so well done... -Right.

So you can feel the desperation in your bones from this scene.

The way this scene is structured, too.

-It is so detailed. -Right.

Exhausted from work, the wife has fallen asleep.

She has been obsessed

-with work. -She has been consumed by it.

It is not about making money, but it is much more than that.

-It has been an obsession. -It has.

It has been her only escape, a way for her to forget.

Many female characters in Kim's movies suffer from

some kind of mental illness.

In Woman of Fire, the main female character suffers from epilepsy.

Right.

In Hwa-nyuh of 82, the maid suffers from some mental breakdown.

-Is it from a sense of guilt in the film? -I think so.

I can't remember it clearly.

-You see again... -You do...

You see the sewing machine turning again.

We saw the machines turning in the fabric mill

-in the first scene of the film. -We did.

It is a scene that matches that first scene.

You can see so clearly how this film was meticulously

conceived, planned, and filmed from the beginning.

When there are two characters in conversation, they always

stand in a position that shows their hierarchical relationship.

One is positioned physically higher than the other.

After The Housemaid was re-discovered in the late 90s and gained

international recognition, the film was restored in 2008.

I was curious how international audiences would receive the film.

A couple of months ago, I had a chance to meet Director Martin Scorsese

and other people in the film industry. During the meeting,

The Housemaid became one of the conversation topics, and

Director Scorsese said, "It's a cinematic masterpiece.”

"You have to see it if you haven't already."” He said this in front of

Marion Cotillard, Paolo Sorrentino, and Fatih Akin, and

I felt so proud even though it wasn't my film.

-I can see why you felt so proud. -I was very proud.

Scorsese also played an important role in restoring this film.

Right.

The man dies at the end, which is...

-a very shocking conclusion. -It is.

-Usually, films have the mistress die at the end. -True.

The one who survives is the wife, with her tenacious instinct

-to survive. -Right.

-And in the remake... -Here, you hear the sound of the baby crying.

-And you also hear... -The sound of a train again.

Here is the problematic scene.

The audience now could burst out laughing at this scene,

and I did, too, when I saw it for the first time.

When I watched it again and thought about why he did this,

I was able to understand Kim's reasons in a way.

Many people think that he had this ending due to the censorship at the time, which is not true.

I think it was done in consideration of the audience.

After watching so many horrendous things in the film,

the audience probably would not have wanted to leave

the theater feeling so disturbed and troubled.

Doesn't the maid look so cute and innocent there?

When people watched the film in the theater, they must have

-laughed watching the ending. -I think so, too.

I'm sure the ending scene was because of the director's consideration of the audience.

The maid was the one who smoked behind the frame.

-Here it is different. -Right.

Dong-sik is the one who's smoking.

And the film asks the audience to make sense of the ending.

Dong-sik says, "What would you have done?"

"Would you have done differently?"

It becomes almost inter- active at the end.

Dong-sik winks at the audience, and the film ends on a very sweet note.

The film is very cunning because Dong-sik is actually addressing

the men in the audience by asking, "What would you have done?"

Women in the audience must have been quite familiar

with the situation of having a live-in maid in their house

because many middle-class people in the audience

had a live-in maid at the time.

So by throwing a question like "What would you have done?"

Would not have made the audience feel at ease. It could have

had the adverse effect of making them feel very uncomfortable.

You mean the film ending wasn't a moral lesson.

-It is only pretending to be one. -I see.

So this is the end of the film, and it is the time

for us to end our commentary for The Housemaid.

It's been several years since I have watched the film,

and I have to say I really enjoyed watching it again.

It is a great film.

I believe it is the dream of every director to make a film

like this one and make his or her contribution to film history.

I will try my best to make that happen.

Thank you for your commentary on the film today.

-Thank you. -Thank you.