The Housemaid (1960) - by Faro

- Do you remember the first time you came to my room?
- Your eyes made me want to give you everything.


Considering that there is currently the option to watch a beautifully restored version of this film for free online at mubi.com (go... go and watch it right now if you haven’t already), and that there was a well-received South Korean remake earlier this year, and (if you are lucky enough to live in Brooklyn) that there will even be a showing at BAM Cinematek this November 23rd at 7pm... it seems this is the year that Kim Ki-young’s psychotic sexual thriller The Housemaid is finally getting the wide-spread acclaim that it deserves.

The intelligent manipulation of an increasingly claustrophobic tension in this film will remind American reviewers of Hitchcock’s best work. It can be felt in a thousand different ways, but perhaps the most subtly dominating way is thru the development of the central staircase of the home as an inverse metaphor for the emotional status of the family. The staircase, which figures prominently in both narrative and aesthetic functions, dominates much of the film but is easily overlooked as the characters move up and down it in their daily actions. At the beginning of the film the staircase is in disarray and chaos, and yet the family unit is strong and stable. The husband is in control, and holds his young family and all of its promise firmly in hand. As the film progresses, the staircase along with the rest of the home is rebuilt and restructured, but unbridled passions have pulled the family apart and destroyed the earlier hopeful possibilities with brutal tragedies. External order can belie an internal chaos, and this disconnect creates a creeping dread through the whole film.

This use of the staircase reveals Kim Ki-young’s attention to and imagination with the formal details of narrative and psychology, but there are also flourishes of total madness that seem to have precedent more in the work of Bunuel & Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (also available for viewing at mubi.com). Like in the way that the housemaid takes dangerous risks in her mission to kill household pests. When we are shown a full and lingering closeup of a rat dying on a poisoned plate of rice we know with Chekovian certainty that this poison in the first act will appear again in the third act with more devastating consequences. Then there is the brutal moralizing that the father inflicts on his crippled daughter. He comes home with a caged squirrel and tells her that it exercises constantly in the cage to keep strength in its legs. She quickly understands his message, and so promises to exercise more, and we watch as she painfully climbs the staircase with her crutches.

Again we return to this staircase… this imposing central staircase of this huge two story house that we increasingly realize is far too much space for this small four person family with a crippled daughter. But they want it; they want the look of success and power it imparts. Like all good members of the middle class, they constantly want to strive to a place just one step higher than where they currently stand at any given moment. When the father’s reputation at work is threatened, he wastes not a single moment in shifting the blame and guilt to someone else. When their social image is threatened by the increasingly destructive actions of the maid, they do everything they can to hide it. But you know how this goes… you now where tight-fisted control and hungry acquisition leads… I don’t need to tell you. Once he succeeds at work, they have more money, so they can acquire this huge house, but it is so large that they of course need a maid to help maintain it. And when they bring in the housemaid…

By taking us up and down this staircase Kim Ki-young gives us an intricate and harrowing examination into the dangers of grasping for social power and how easily the power of sex can reshape the contours of family and social dynamics... a subject that is endlessly fascinating to all of us because we all love sex and we all love power, and more often than we care to admit we know that the two are intertwined. This movie admits and explores this interaction to devastating affect.


- Die with me. Make me the happiest woman.