At the recently concluded 92nd "Oscars", the Korean film "Parasite" won the Best Picture Award.
Recently, the British "Guardian" selected the "top twenty Korean films", in this list, the first place is not "Parasite" but "Miss", which makes many fans "surprised".
In the author's opinion, these two movies are not divided, if you must divide who is better? The two films have different superficial storylines, but the themes involve money and emotional games, and "Miss" shines because of its feminist perspective.
"Miss" is a film by South Korean director Park Chan-wook, which tells the story of money and love between the noble lady who inherited a huge amount of wealth during the Japanese colonial rule of Korea, the liar earl who coveted her property, the maid who was hired by the earl to approach the lady, and the lady's guardian.
Why can this film be interpreted in a feminist perspective?
Let's start with an understanding of what feminism is.
The term feminism is used to describe political, cultural or economic movements (women's right to vote, equal pay for men and women for equal work, etc.) aimed at establishing equal rights and legal protection for women. Feminism has evolved and developed since its birth in the 19th century in Western social reforms, and its connotations have been enriched.
As a feminist theory of cultural thought, it advocates examining all phenomena and value judgments of patriarchal society from a female perspective and forming its own new aesthetic concept.
South Korea is a patriarchal society in history, and the status of women is relatively low with the obvious idea of "male superiority over female inferiority". Based on this social structure, early Korean films always revolved around the male discourse system, which imposed various restrictions on women based on the basic ethics and morality of society.
However, with the introduction and penetration of Western feminism, many Korean directors began to pay attention to women's demands and self-expression after the new century.
The popular "My Savage Girlfriend" breaks the audience's inherent perception of women - women are no longer gentle and virtuous symbolic images, women can also be hot and strong, and their personalities are fierce. Such a female image made the audience refreshed, and quickly became popular in South Korea and became popular throughout Asia.
Today's focus on the movie "Miss" is adapted from the British female writer Sarah Waters's novel "City of Thorns", and this novel was made by the BBC in 2008 into a mini-series "Finger Picking", which was popular in the UK and caused a great response and sensation.
The original storyline takes place in Victorian Britain, and South Korean director Park Chan-wook transplants the background of the entire story to the 1930s, and North Korea, which is shrouded by Japanese imperialism, gives the whole film a unique oriental gloomy beauty.
The film is divided into three parts.
The first part is told through the perspective of Nam Shu-hime, who pretends to be a handmaiden and is actually a thief.
She incarnates as Miss Lady's handmaiden and conspires with a swindler to defraud a young noble Lady Hideko. Hideko was raised by her uncle and inherited a huge inheritance from her parents. The crook pretends to be the earl to seduce the young lady to marry him, and then puts her in a mental hospital to seize the property, while Nan Shuji is responsible for creating opportunities for the cheater and giving the psychological hint that the young lady is in love with the liar.
However, in the day and night between the young lady and the handmaiden, the two developed ambiguous feelings. The maid hated the deception of the liar to the young lady, but in order to get a better life for herself, she did not tear the mask of the hypocrisy of the liar.
Unexpectedly, however, it was the maid herself who was imprisoned in the lunatic asylum, and the lady continued to live as a maid.
The second part is the perspective of the young lady. She had lived under the oppression of her uncle since childhood and witnessed her aunt being forced to death by her uncle.
Her uncle ordered her to read filthy books in public in costume as a Japanese geisha to please the people so that the books could sell at high prices. Live a life of losing yourself like a doll.
And she wants to use the scheme of the liar, and will make a plan to escape from her uncle's control. But in the process of pretending to deceive the handmaiden, she developed a different feeling for the maid, but the maid kept persuading her to be with the deceiver when she knew the tricker's trickery.
Sad and desperate, the young lady decides to hang herself to end her unfortunate fate, but is saved by the maid who is looking for her. The two finally opened their hearts, exchanged heartfelt feelings, and reached a joint effort. In the end, the young lady and the maid left Korea together and began a new life.
"Miss", which adopts a non-linear narrative, the perspective of the first two narratives is Nan Shuji and Xiuzi, respectively.
Through the conversion of different perspectives, not only did it complete the many reversals of the plot, but also enriched the character image of Miss Xiuzi. And this repetition of the narrative gives different meanings to the same scene. Just when you confidently think that you have glimpsed the truth behind this scam, the screenwriter's pen turns, allowing the narrative to twist and turn, and more things under the water surface little by little, giving the audience a shocking look.
From Nan Shuji's point of view, Miss Hideko is a pale, naïve and unworldly aristocratic maiden who is controlled by her uncle and fiancé and has no chance to decide her own destiny.
From Hideko's point of view, she is a very intelligent, tough and resourceful woman. Superficial subordination to others, is for survival, and once awakened, the actions are amazing.
Miss Xiuzi is the prey of the Earl of the Liar, and Nan Shuji is even tricked by the Earl.
But in the male-dominated deception, Hideko and Nan Shuji attract each other and redeem each other, and the female perspective is also the embodiment of women's own initiative. It is this initiative that subverts the oppression of women by male power and puts fate in the hands of women themselves.
Whether it is the innocent and simple Nan Shuji, or the elegant and charming Xiuzi, they are stared at by the male director behind the camera, stared at by the male characters in the play, and stared at by the male audience in the dark theater, under the triple gaze, women are rewritten as symbols of desire in the male world, and they live according to the laws of the male world.
But when Nan Shuji learned all that her uncle had done to Hideko, she burned the precious books that her uncle had collected for many years and destroyed them. And these books originally meant the restraint and oppression of Xiuzi by the male power. This invisible bondage and the snake-like statue at the door of the study that was decapitated by Nan Shuji were destroyed, and Hideko's female consciousness quickly awakened. And when the two escaped from their uncle's house overnight and crossed the wall, this was also the first step for them to break through the shackles of male power and run to freedom.
During the Japanese occupation of Korea, Korean men lost their national independence, which meant that they also lost their political and cultural rights. In order to maintain the status and dignity of men, they imposed stricter control over women: not only to imprison their personal freedom, but also to suppress them on a spiritual level.
The uncle's house does not allow the presence of sunlight, the strange house deep in the jungle, the dark and mysterious library... The house resembles a prison used to imprison women.
This symbolizes the disenfranchisement of women, the body in a cage, and the mental oppression of men, with no autonomy to speak of. They live, like the two muppets at the mercy of men.
Simon de Beauvoir, a representative of the women's movement, once said in The Second Sex, "Women are the second sex, excluding the 'other' outside the male." Power rests with men and women as mere vassals. The patronage of vassals comes from power, and so does discrimination. ”
Miss Hideko inherited a lot of inheritance, but she can still only become a vassal of her uncle, and it is because of these inheritances that she will be raised by her uncle and will be targeted by scammers. Under the oppression of this power, women have little room for resistance: their aunts cannot withstand the pressure to commit suicide, and the housekeeper Sasaki becomes an accomplice of her uncle's oppression of Hideko. They are not living people to men, but just goods that can create profits – who really cares about goods?
All the male characters in "Miss" are not positive, they are greedy, evil, obscene, and try to control the fate of women, and achieve themselves by sacrificing women's lives and happiness.
Because of this, the two protagonists in "Miss" are women, they redeem each other, they achieve each other, and they seek each other's most credible partners on the road to new life and freedom.
Hideko saves Nan Shuji from the Count's deception from being imprisoned in a lunatic asylum, and Nan Shuji saves Shuzi from the tree where her aunt hanged her, and blatantly tears her nightmares apart, helping her to free herself from her unfortunate life.
The lack of men in emotional relationships is also a reflection of Park Chan-wook feminism. The film shows women that there is no need to surrender to the supremacy of male rights, there is no need to fantasize about men to save, and it is possible to win the reversal of life by believing in and relying on the power of women's mutual help.
At the end of the film, Hideko throws away the long skirt she has been wearing in the past, changes into pants with blurred gender boundaries, disguises herself as a man, and tricks the ticket inspector into successfully taking Nan Shuji on board.
This is a symbol of women's desire for male power, a challenge to male power, and a mockery of the incompetent male group.
The fact that the Earl and the Shady Uncle are locked up in a gloomy basement and imprisoned forever in a strange house is both an inversion of the position of the characters in the play and an externalized manifestation of the transfer of power.
Strong or calculating, men fall in their own shackles, and the audience thinks that what they see is only deception and suspense, about the struggle for wealth. (This point coincides with Parasite), but from a female perspective, the story is a story of two women freeing themselves from male control from beginning to end.
Since then, the maid has not been a pawn of the liar, and the young lady is no longer a tool controlled by her uncle, and the two women walk hand in hand, regardless of status or inferiority, and only ask the future to wake up.
The destination of Hideko and Nan Shuji was Shanghai, which was open and trendy at that time, where Western industrial civilization was impacting the traditional ideas of the East. This also pins on the director's expectations for the self-determination of women's rights and interests - with the spread of civilized and open atmosphere, the prospect of women's awakening will be optimistic and promising.
In summary, Park Chan-wook placed a feminist perspective in the suspenseful and erotic story of the original work, and with the help of a special era background, "Miss" has a deeper, more diverse connotation to watch and think under the premise of full tension.
The afterglow of the film is gone, and when we turn our attention to the current society, women around the world are waking up with a variety of new faces, and let us give us more understanding, regardless of your gender.