Waters herself concedes that “it seemed a slightly mind-boggling idea”. In the novel, the pickpocket Sue is lured away from a bustling thieves’ kitchen in London to the countryside with the promise of a share in a soon-to-be-stolen fortune in the film, seamstress Sook-hee is hustled off into a rainstorm on an undeclared mission at the house of a rich Japanese recluse, leaving a wailing chorus of women and babies huddled beneath the eaves of their roadside shack.įans of the novel might well wonder how Waters’ richly verbal story of lesbian sexuality – a gasp of release from the sensuously evoked corsetry of Victorian female propriety – could survive this transformation, and not least because the director is a man, with a reputation for making macho films of extravagant violence. The Handmaiden transports the story from Victorian England to Korea in the 1930s, when the peninsula was occupied by Japan. Now it has been reimagined in film by Korean director Park Chan-wook, who has defied differences in culture, gender and media to create a complementary classic of erotic cinema. Published in 2002, Fingersmith is a story of deception involving a pickpocket, a conman, a pornographer and an heiress.
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