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A Hand for ‘The Handmaiden’

October 21, 2016 in Book Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

handmaidenAlthough I admire all adaptations that do their job well, I confess I have a soft spot in my heart for the truly creative ones – films that capture the essence of a book by transposing it into a seemingly unimaginable context. Its lavish, cruelly sensual flourishes may not be for everyone but “The Handmaiden,” South Korean revenge thriller director Park Chan-wook’s Korean- and Japanese-language take on Welsh novelist Sarah Waters’s Victorian-set romantic thriller Fingersmith, may be the best adaptation of this year. It is certainly the most innovative.

Set in 1930s Korea at the height of Japanese colonialism, the screenplay (crafted by Park and Chung Seo-Kyung) follows Waters’s triptych narrative structure as well as her basic premise. The first section is narrated by Nam Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), an orphan girl raised as a pickpocket by a human trafficker. A Korean gold-digger (Ha Jung-woo) posing as the Japanese Count Fujiwara (we never learn his real name) enlists her in his seduction of Hideko (Kim Min-hee), a Japanese heiress living with her guardian, Korean Uncle Kouzuki (Jo Jin-woong). The plan is for Sook-hee to gain Hideko’s confidence by working as her personal maid, and then commit her to a mental asylum once Fujiwara marries her so they can pocket her inheritance. What gums up the plan: the handmaiden falls head over heels for her mistress, with whom she shares a thrilling sexual chemistry. Continue Reading →

Resistance, Reckoning, ‘Birth of a Nation’

October 7, 2016 in Book Matters, Country Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

screen-shot-2016-10-07-at-10-13-49-amBy now it is impossible to discuss “The Birth of a Nation,” star and director Nate Parker’s adaptation of the story he cowrote with Jean McGianni Celestin, without acknowledging the controversy surrounding this film. This may not be fair: No matter what allegations have been heaped upon such filmmakers as Woody Allen or Roman Polanski, their work is still largely taken on its own measure. (This is not the case for Mel Gibson, whose career has yet to recover from his 2010 alcohol-fueled hate spewings.) But reviewing “The Birth of a Nation” is especially complex given how the accusations weighed upon its creator intersect with its subject matter.

A far cry from a remake of the 1915 pro-Klan movie, this “The Birth of a Nation” is the story of the Virginia-born slave and Baptist preacher Nat Turner (played by Parker) who, in 1831, led a revolt that claimed the lives of sixty whites, most of whom belonged to slave-owning families. Parker has said he reclaimed that film’s title because Nat Turner birthed a “nation of resisters, a people truly willing to die for absolute freedom and liberation.” Turner’s story has been told before – most notably in William Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, extremely problematic historical novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner – but never with such a clear-eyed, holistic fortitude, and never in a way that so powerfully connects it to the tensions still undercutting American life. Continue Reading →

The Myth of Unlikability: ‘The Girl on the Train’

October 6, 2016 in Book Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

trainedFirst things first: “The Girl on the Train” is a wonderfully faithful adaptation.

In a move that seems downright brilliant now, the film rights for Paula Hawkins’s dark mystery were bought months before its early 2015 publication, at which time it went on to sell more than eleven million copies, spend months on international best-seller lists, and capture us by the throat with an unnerving, elegantly wrought tension. Yet the early purchase of those rights was not eerily prescient, for the book is cinematic in the very best of ways: At core, it is about the power and pain of the female gaze. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy