Hanyo (1960)

A composer and his wife are thrown into turmoil when a housemaid becomes more than they bargained for.

Director:

Ki-young Kim

Writer:

Ki-young Kim

Stars:

Jin Kyu Kim, Jeung-nyeo Ju, Eun-shim Lee

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Jin Kyu Kim	...	Dong-sik Kim
Jeung-nyeo Ju	...	Mrs. Kim
Eun-shim Lee	...	Myung-sook
Aeng-ran Eom	...	Kyung-hee Cho
Seon-ae Ko	...	Seon-young Kwak
Sook-Rang Wang
Seok-je Kang
Jeong-ok Na
Sung-Ki Ahn	...	Chang-soon Kim (as Sung-kee Ahn)
Yoo-ri Lee	...	Ae-soon Kim
Jeong-hee Ok
Ok-joo Le
Nam-hyeon Choi
Bang-Choon Nam
Seok-geun Jo	...	(as Seok-Geun Cho)

Storyline

In the 60s in Korea, the piano teacher Mr. Kim works in a factory giving music classes to the workers. When he receives a love letter from the student Miss Kwak, he delivers the letter to the supervisor and the worker is suspended for three days. Mr. Kim is a family man, married with two children, the girl Ae-Soon and the boy Chang-Soon, and he has just built and moved to a bigger house of his own. His wife Mrs. Kim also works too much at a sewing machine and they need a housemaid to help her in the housework. Mr. Kim asks Kwak's best friend, Miss Kyung Hee Cho, who is his private student of piano, to help him to find a housemaid. Miss Cho invites an unstable and unbalanced young woman to work for Mr. and Mrs. Kim and she introduces the housemaid to the family. Mr. Kim hires the youth and brings her to the household. But soon she behaves in a strange way, snooping Mr. Kim's private classes until the night that she seduces Mr. Kim and they have intercourse. The housemaid gets pregnant ...

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Plot Keywords:

korean noir | master maid relationship | south korea | piano | factory | 

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Genres:

Crime | Drama | Thriller

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Certificate:

G

Did You Know?

Trivia

This film is part of the Criterion Collection, spine #690.

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Goofs

With the exception of some authentic close-ups, the piano playing, throughout the film, is very poorly mimed; with piano playing and piano teaching such an important part of the plot this seems rather surprising.

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Connections

Referenced in Century of Cinema: Gilwe-eui younghwa (1995)

User Reviews

Stunning, shocking, utterly ridiculous melodrama a-go-go

I haven't seen before melodrama as stunning, shocking, utterly ridiculous and in full knowledge of it, Korea's cautionary tale answer on marital infidelity to Reefer Madness if it weren't at the same time as cinematically vibrant and obstinate as the best works of Sam Fuller, driven by suspenseful will and heavy with undertones of something at once sinister and horrifying to make you think parts of it were destined at some point for Les Diaboliques or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, as Ki-young Kim's The Housemaid; for all intents and purposes, this is melodrama a-go-go, not in the cosmopolitan sense of the term, but ironic and campy, a dazzling movie steeped in artifice and insanely interesting human behaviour that sets out to provoke and push common sense to a limit.

A well to do couple hires a maid to help out the wife with the chores around the house, but no sooner has she gone into the kitchen to get a glass of water than the entire household threatens to collapse in ruins of rat poison and unwanted pregnancies, illicit thrysts and alliances striken casually and alternatively between the wife and the maid who is now a mistress, the wife and the husband against the maid who they need to be rid off before she talks of the affair, the maid and the husband against each other and their own selves.

The other movie I've seen by Ki-young Kim is, Iodo, a Korean version of The Wicker Man that takes place in a remote island populated exclusively by fisherwomen. It was also utterly bonkers, the most outrageous plotting this side of Italian exploitation, but it lacked the ability to see that in itself, to recognize the madness and defy it. The Housemaid at first seems like the product of Ed Wood incompetence. Some of the dialogue and character behavior had me in stitches. But it soon reveals that to be a facade which the movie can lift and put back in place at whim, so that it can be all things to all people not because of any particular notion of ambiguity shared by Ki-young Kim because the movie is blunt like a hammer in the face, but because it doesn't abide by any notion of common sense or realism unless it wants to. The movie behaves with the same audacity of its maid protagonist. It sets up an image of a socially upwards mobile household where a couple can afford to buy a television even if it means hours of slaving away on a sewing machine to get it, and then affronts it violently, perversely toys with it and corrupts it to the heart.

In the end, if any more clue was required, we get fourth walls broken and a man winking straight at us. This is Panic Theater at its best, with the selfaware avant-garde tropes replaced by unselfconscious soap opera clichés.

Details

Country:

South Korea

Language:

Korean

Release Date:

3 November 1960 (South Korea)

Also Known As:

The Housemaid

Filming Locations:

Seoul, South Korea

Company Credits

Production Co:

Hanguk Munye Yeonghwa, Kim Ki-Young Production

Technical Specs

Runtime:

109 min 111 min (restored print)

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.55 : 1