Among its many accolades, the film was in competition for the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and won the 2018 BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Award for Best Film Not in the English Language.

Upon its international release, the film garnered critical and commercial success. ‘From the director of Oldboy and Stoker’ is indeed the top line that adorns the film’s UK theatrical poster ( Figure 1). An eagerly awaited film since his English language thriller Stoker (2013), The Handmaiden was very much promoted worldwide as the film by Park Chan-wook, an acclaimed international auteur. The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi / 아가씨, 2016) Footnote 1 is the tenth feature film by the South Korean director Park Chan-wook, who is mainly known for his highly stylized and visceral tales of vengeance that includes the Cannes Film Festival prize winner Oldboy (Oldeuboi, 2003). Taking her comments as a framework, the article explores the ways in which the film carries over the transgressive allure of the original story, while addressing the issues of history and identity in another time and place. Despite all the changes the film makes to the original novel, the author Waters claims that the film is ‘faithful’ to her work.

In the process of cultural relocation, the film gives prominence to the ethnic identities and hierarchies in colonial Korea, and in recounting the unfolding lesbian love story between a petty-thief-disguised-as-maid and a noble lady, the film provides a spectacular, visual ‘translation’ of the novel’s approach to the story of same-sex desire. Transporting the story of love and deception from Victorian England to 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule, the film offers a compelling case of transnational or cross-cultural adaptation. This article considers the South Korean auteur director Park Chan-wook’s latest film The Handmaiden, which is the film adaptation of British writer Sarah Waters’s third novel Fingersmith.

Handmaiden sarah waters