Special Symposium on the Tenth Anniversary of the film “The Handmaiden”

Hee-seung Irene Lee, Korea Foundation Senior Lecturer, Univ of Auckland

""Speaking Otherwise: The Handmaiden and the Conditions of Narration in Park Chan-wook’s Adaptations"

Adaptation is often approached through questions of how a story changes when it is retold. This talk asks instead what happens to the conditions of narration when a story is adapted: who comes to speak, from where, through what relations, and under what historical circumstances a story becomes narratable. This question emerges from The Handmaiden (2016), whose tenth anniversary provides the occasion to revisit the film not simply as an accomplished adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002), but as a project that transforms the conditions under which its story can be told. Park Chan-wook’s wider practice of adaptation offers a way to situate this intervention. Across his adaptations, Park brings historically constituted Korean modes of narration—relational vocabularies, forms of address, and postcolonial memory—to bear on source texts, opening new possibilities through their transformation.

The Handmaiden is the primary case. Building on my earlier reading of the film’s queer futurity (Lee 2025), I focus on the scale at which its intervention becomes particularly precise: a single word. Hideko’s question—“Is this what the books call dongmu?”—summons a relational vocabulary from the women’s reading and writing cultures of colonial Korea that Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith could not have evoked. Read alongside the film’s bilingual title, Agassi/The Handmaiden, this linguistic intervention renews the conditions of narration towards a more equal and collaborative queer relationality. The relocation of Waters’s neo-Victorian narrative to colonial Korea thus reconfigures the relations among gender, sexuality, class, language, and colonial modernity through which its characters and desires become intelligible.

The talk then turns briefly to The Sympathizer (HBO, 2024), where a related operation works towards the graphic realisation of the postcolonial mobility contained in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel (2015). Park relocates the site of the narrator’s confession to the audiovisual architecture of confinement and surveillance established from the show’s opening. Read together, the two adaptations reveal a recurring feature of Park’s practice: adaptation can alter the very conditions under which it can speak to new audiences. What travels, finally, are ways of speaking, remembering, and relating. Authentic cultural translation emerges through this art of adaptation, as stories encounter historical and cultural formations that reshape what they can say and how they can be heard.

Kyung Moon Hwang, Korea Foundation Professor, ANU

“Passage to a Distant Harbour: Vehicles of Colonial Escape in The Handmaiden”

A consistent visual cue in recent Korean historical films is the appearance of the railway or train to signal fate or confinement—whether for individual characters and families to the nation itself. In The Handmaiden, the train appears only fleetingly, albeit significantly, and is mostly replaced in its symbolic value by the automobile, a relatively new vehicle in the early 20th century. But just as prominent is the ship or boat as a mechanism for freedom or escape, from constraints ranging from the geographical to the psychological. This presentation attempts a scenic analysis of The Handmaiden in order to interpret how vehicles fit into the film’s broader messaging about the film’s colonial setting.

Discussant: Prof Hyangjin Lee, Rikkyo University

Light meal will be provided half-hour before event

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