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In the Flesh: The Housemaid (1960)
🕑 Added 2021-06-07 07:38:23 +0000 UTCNestled between the tongue-in-cheek moralizing of its nearly Leave It to Beaver-esque opening and closing monologues, Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid is a blackly satirical thriller about the fragility of the bourgeois mid-century Korean nuclear family. When the respectable, hard-working Kims take on a housemaid (Lee Eun-shim) to help keep up with the demands of their newly-built home, the unstable young woman quickly seeks to insinuate herself into the household by seducing patriarch Kim Dong-sik (Kim Jin-kyu). Fault lines appear almost immediately, echoing Mrs. Kim’s admonition at the start of the film that even talking about threats to the family unit is an invitation to disaster. The structure of the particular well-to-do type of household exemplified by the Kims depends on silence, on isolation, and on the othering of everyone beneath its social status.
The titular housemaid, Myung-sook, is a threat to this staid and polite domestic order not because she possesses power or intelligence but because she is damaged enough to ignore the unspoken rules of the society around her. She says “my desires matter the most” and it completely shatters the household, no member of which has any idea what to do about her aberrant behavior. We learn next to nothing about Myung-sook’s background, but Lee plays her as erratic, tempestuous, and with some sort of cognitive divergence which renders her only tenuously able to predict consequences or understand the people around her. She scurries from room to room to observe Dong-sik, an inelegant voyeur pressed like a sticky-fingered child outside a candy shop against the glass of the sliding balcony door. She often licks her lips — an anxious, reptilian tic. In short it’s her weakness, her neediness, not her strength, which collapses society.
It’s Mrs. Kim’s (Ju Jeung-ryu) bodily “weakness” which permits Myung-sook entry into their home in the first place. Driven by her desire to own property, to send her children to college, to buy a television set, Mrs. Kim collapses from exhaustion when a rat startles her by appearing in a kitchen cupboard. Notably, Mr. Kim also insists that his daughter Ae-soon (Lee Yoo-ri) exercise to the point of exhaustion in order to strengthen her polio-damaged leg muscles, even illustrating his point with a gift: a pet squirrel with an exercise wheel built into its cage. All this grueling, endless work, and for what? The Kims are trapped inside their own class-climbing ambitions, too brittle and unselfaware to see that the house they’re building is nothing but a big, beige, boring tomb.
