Synopsis
Legendary, and seemingly immortal, filmmaker KIM Ki Young's The Housemaid satirizes Korea of the 1960s, the era occupied in national "modernization" frenzy, through the eyes of low-caste members of the society. A Freudian dissection of the "Yes, We Can" mentality of the period under iron-fist dictatorship and of the blurry class consciousness and helplessness of the people as represented by a financially and sexually incompetent male, Housemaid imparts a story of a bourgeois man who teaches music to female employees at a factory. He succumbs to the sexual cobweb of a housemaid -- a supplier of labor to a middleclass family -- who rapidly turns into a femme fatal character capable of destroying her victim as well as his home. Female monstrosity and male regression are the principal attraction, and the arsenal, of this masterpiece restored from its black-and-white original for the current digital rendition. (KIM Young Jin)