하녀 The Housemaid 2010

The Housemaid (하녀 下女) is a 2010 South Korean melodramatic thriller film directed by Im Sang-soo. The story focuses on Eun-yi, played by Jeon Do-yeon, who becomes involved in a destructive love triangle while working as a housemaid for an upper-class family. Other cast members include Lee Jung-jae, Seo Woo and Yoon Yeo-jeong. The film is a remake of Kim Ki-young's 1960 film The Housemaid. It competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

• Jeon Do-yeon as Eun-yi
• Lee Jung-jae as Hoon
• Seo Woo as Hae-ra
• Yoon Yeo-jeong as Byeong-sik
• Ahn Seo-hyeon as Nami
• Park Ji-young as Mi-hee
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A first screenplay for the film was written by Kim Soo-hyun, but after director Im Sang-soo had edited the script so heavily that Kim considered it to be entirely Im's own work, she decided to leave the project and publicly expressed her dissatisfaction. Although the film includes some key elements of the original, Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid from 1960, Im has said that he tried to never think of it during the production in order to come up with a modern and original work. one major difference between the versions is that the original film took place in the middle class, while the remake is set in an extreme upper-class environment. Im explains this with South Korea's social structure around 1960, which was a time when the country's middle class started to form and many poor people moved from the countryside to work in the cities: "women became housemaids who served not only for the rich but also the middle class and that issue had served as the basis to Kim Ki-young's work. What I realized upon reworking The Housemaid in 50 years was that there are much more wealthy people now, people who are millionaires. ... I wanted to depict the reality in which housewives from normal families have to undertake hard work too". The film was produced by the Seoul-based company Mirovision.

In the bird's-eye shots used in the film from time to time, a large ornate chandelier is an observer that looks down on the bourgeois family for which Eun-yi works. It also plays a role in the dramatic and tragic end of the movie’s heroine. That chandelier in all its detail is actually a copy of the 2008 work “Song of Dionysus” created by artist Bae Young-whan. The decision to include the chandelier in The Housemaid was quite a deliberate one. At first glance, the light fixture looks like an elegant Art Nouveau craft, but a closer look reveals that its green glass pieces are actually sharp shards from broken wine and soju bottles. In the same sense, the high-class family members in the movie look elegant at a glance but are actually selfish and cruel enough to break their housemaid’s heart.

하녀 (The Housemaid/ HaNyo/ HaNyeo) 
1960/ South Korea/ 111min/ Drama, Crime 
Director: 김기영 (Kim Ki-young) 
Cast: 김진규, 주중녀, 이은심, 엄앵란, 안성기 
Korea Theatrical Run: 1960.11.03 

Korea Theatrical Run (Re-Release): 2010.06.03.thu