❤️💙💛GRACEFUL💛💙❤️

hello. you mean the take from the screenshot?

1. saying that park chan-wook is a straight man with a lesbian fetish is a completely unfounded rumour!!! most likely extrapolated from a popular video essay published on youtube last year that falsely equates it with blue is the warmest colour, another lesbian film where the male director abtellatif kechiche forced the lead actresses to perform multiple takes of the sex scenes over 10 days. the handmaiden sex scenes were shot in one day on a closed set with an all woman crew and not even pcw was present. the actresses were shown storyboards that detailed every shot and knew exactly what the scenes would entail ahead of time before even signing on to the film. there is no evidence of a lesbian fetish in pcw's work bc there simply are no lesbians in his other films, unless you count a few characters in the womens prison in lady vengeance 2005. which btw was co-written by jeong seo-kyeong, a female screenwriter whom pcw has collaborated with on almost all his films since 2005, including the handmaiden, but no one ever mentions that when they want to criticise the film for the male gaze because it doesn't fit their narrative. no better than misogynists trying to erase the work of a woman integral to a mans success.

2. to assume those sex scenes in the handmaiden exist only as fetish content for straight men shows a complete misunderstanding/erasure of the story's core themes specifically about the male gaze and pornography and the many ways lesbian sexuality is affected by those things. by refusing to engage with this fundamental aspect of the narrative, the commenter and other viewers like them have reduced the actresses to sex objects. there's also some underlying racism here as well to see 2 asian women fuck and suddenly the context of the last 2 hours of misogynist lesbophobic abuse you just saw them go through in this movie becomes irrelevant to you and it's all just gratuitous "fetish" content. not everyone with the male gaze is male lol. I think it's also safe to assume the commenter has never even read sarah waters' original novel which is also explicitly about pornography, bc they'd know the handmaiden is an almost perfect visual translation of all those themes which waters herself acknowledges and approves of but again that's just another fact people like to erase bc it doesn't fit into their narrative of a male filmmaker violating a lesbians story which they only cooked up because