F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that the rich “are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” South Korean director Sang-soo Im uses a remake of a 50-year-old film to explore this idea. At the same time, like its predecessor, it’s a psychological drama. Do-yeon Jeon (Secret Sunshine) plays the title character, whose sexual liaison with her wealthy employer begins a surprising and unfortunate chain of events.
When the original version of this movie was made, in 1960, South Korea was a poorer country, and the family the girl works for has struggled to afford a nice house. Here, although we never find out the source of the wealth, it’s clear that the husband has never wanted for it, and that his wife, pregnant with twins, shares his attitude of entitlement. There are a couple of other significant characters not found in the 1960 version. Notably there is an older servant who has been with the family four decades. As the film goes on, we find that she is more than a stock character, but instead a woman with her own resentments and motivation.
The older film is a well-made, but at times campy, melodrama that winds up being a bit like Fatal Attraction. Besides the issue of class being much more prominent here, the other difference is that the maid herself is a much more thought-out character, really a different one altogether. In the original, she veers wildly between heartsickness and vindictiveness in a way that suggests she’s simply a crazy girl. Sang-soo’s film is much more sympathetic to the maid. For her employer, there is another quote, attributed to Diogenes, the Greek philosopher, that seems apt: “In a rich man’s house there is no place to spit but his face.”
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/24/10
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