The Housemaid (1960)

Quite some time back, TCM ran a new-to-me South Korean film called The Housemaid. It got a restoration in 2008 thanks in part to Martin Scorsese's World Film Foundation, which meant that it made its way to a pricey Criterion box set. However, when I searched Amazon I couldn't find that box set, so I didn't blog about the movie. It's on again overnight tonight at 4:00 AM (or early tomorrow morning if that's your perspective) as the second film in the night's TCM Import slot, so now was the perfect time to finally watch it and do a blog post on it.

In what is probably a provincial town/small city somewhere in South Korea, there's a company town-type textile factory, employing a whole bunch of young women and housing them in dormitories. (Think the shoe factory in Miloš Forman's Loves of a Blonde, or the defense plant in Millions Like Us.) The bosses also have a social program for the young women, with one of the activities being music. That program is run by Mr. Kim, a composer who seems surprisingly well off. He's got a piano at home, a wife who takes in sewing to make a little extra money, and two kids. He's even been busy building a small house for the family to move into.

One of the female employees, Miss Kwak, has developed an attraction for Mr. Kim, which is a big no-no since he's married and the female employees are supposed to be virtuous. She writes a letter to Kim and slips it under the cover of the piano keyboard for Kim to find. Kim is none too pleased, and when he reports this to the bosses, it gets Kwak fired, forcing her to go back to her rural home and live with her parents. (As subpar, especially compared to the standards of 2020, as these factory jobs may be, don't forget that people took them in order to get away from the even more grinding poverty of rural life in a country just a few years past a devastating civil war.)

Miss Cho is one of Miss Kwak's friends from the factory, and she's always been interested in taking piano lessons, so she goes to see Mr. Cho at his house one evening. Having a bigger home isn't always easier as there's more work and even a rat problem for which the Kims have some rat poison in their kitchen cabinet in what is an obvious bit of foreshadowing. This, combined with Mrs. Kim's being pregnant with the couple's third child, leads the Kims to think perhaps they could use a maid. And perhaps Miss Cho might know somebody who would be interested in taking the job.

Miss Cho introduces them to Myung-sook, who takes the job and immediately becomes a part of the family. So much so, in fact, that she starts having an affair with Mr. Kim. Worse for all involved, it's a relationship that gets her knocked up. And boy is Myung-sook one jealous woman. Mr. Kim doesn't know what to do, while Mrs. Kim is more concerned with her husband's job and social position, so he should just give in to Myung-sook's demands, which only exacerbates the situation.

The Housemaid is an interesting movie that's part noir, as the titular maid is clearly a femme fatale in the noir mold. But it's also a combination of the Hollywood potboiler/melodrama that was a thing in the 1950s and 1960s, although a more intimate potboiler than what Hollywood made, since a lot of it is set in the Kim house. I found myself thinking of Joan Crawford in Queen Bee, although Myung-sook, the manipulative character, isn't the matriarch the way Crawford was. However, even more than the Hollywood melodramas, The Housemaid takes a sharp and extreme turn into the absurd in the second half, with characters acting in ways that defy plausibility.

With that in mind, I can see why some people might not care for The Housemaid, as it seems unrealistic and shrill. However, there are fans of classic films that enjoy those 1950s Hollywood melodramas, and I think those people will really enjoy The Housemaid and the way it goes totally bonkers. I'm in that second group, and I certainly enjoyed the movie in spite of the messy plot. Director Kim Ki-young also does a pretty good job with the camera, especially on the second floor of the house where the music room and Myung-sook's bedroom have a common balcony and the camera pans effectively between the two rooms.

In the end, The Housemaid is an interesting movie that I think is fairly accessible to English speakers because the plot is really one that's not too far from old Hollywood movies. It's just set in a different society with different cultural norms, one that's early on the road to developing into an economic powerhouse. Despite the movie's plot flaws, The Housemaid is definitely one that should be seen.