After a six-year absence, director Chan-wook Park comes back to Korean cinematic storytelling. The Oldboy filmaker began production on his latest, the lesbian drama Fingersmith, last week near Nagoya, Japan.
This serves as the filmmaker’s follow-up to his English-language debut Stoker, which earned fairly mixed reviews and didn’t particularly wow me as much as I would have wanted it to either, and his first native-language feature since 2009’s Thirst. A re-interpretation of Sarah Waters Victorian-era novel of the same name, Park’s latest relocates the action to Korea and Japan within the 1930s, which looks at a time when Korea was under the strict gaze of Japan’s occupation.
Fingersmith returns the director with his long-time screenwriter Seo-Gyeong Jeong, whom previously penned Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK and the aforementioned Thirst with the filmmaker. Though it seems this adaptation is the writer’s first solo writing credit.
That’s not the only returning Park regular on the film, however. Chung-hoon Chung, the cinematographer behind every one of the filmmaker’s films since Oldboy, and who did some gorgeous work of late on Me & Earl & the Dying Girl, comes back to shoot the movie, while Thirst and Oldboy production designer Ryu Seong-hee also lends her talents.
With Park also attached to the sci-fi thriller Second Born as of last year, his return to his native language may not be permanent. Keep in mind, I didn’t dislike Stoker necessarily, but it definitely felt as though something was missing from his previous films. Hopefully, Fingersmith will let him bring back that spark which made him such a great filmmaker before. [Variety]
