[HanCinema's Classics] "Woman of Fire" (1971): Infestations of the Heart and Home

Riddled with rats, reds, and psychosexual perversions, Kim Ki-young's "Woman of Fire" (1971) is disturbing classic of note. If home is where the heart is, the castle from which a man rules, then untested kings beware; for no walls are higher enough and no moat too toxic to prevent Kim's black-blooded and blackmailing femme fatales from scurrying in and chewing on the phallic foundations. 

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"Woman of Fire" is the second motion picture in Kim Ki-young's 'housemaid trilogy', an adulterous series of misfortunate sexapades that started with Kim's masterly "The Housemaid - 1960", was further fuelled by "Woman of Fire", and rekindled once more with "Woman of Fire 82" (1982). These incendiary time capsules are all variants and remakes of the same disastrous domestic scenario, celluloided celebrations of fantastical femme fatales that enter Korea's strawman's mansions and gnaw at the hibernating hamartia that resides. In these Trojan tropes, corruptible morality is explored through psychosexual themes of fantasy and desire, threats to the hearth brought about by the welcoming of a dormant sexual reactor into the nuclear family.

In "Woman of Fire", Kim once again follows a middle-class family crowned by a songwriter/musical teacher, a struggle artist of sorts that has a happy home filled with laughing children and a dedicated wife. This idealistic unit is then infected through an unexpected entity, a cute country bumpkin hired by Dong-sik's wife as a housemaid: a corrosive sex bomb qua dainty domestic servant. Myeong-ja is a troubled country gal who was forced to abandon her rural life after she dented, albeit in self-defence, the skull of a horny and rape-crazed blacksmith. The trauma of her bloodied hands still lingers, the psychic residue of which is awakened when sexual acts are about. When Myeong-ja overhears, then spies, her employer's lovemaking, she falls victim to an epileptic fit and her body spasms beyond her control; a twisted reminder that this femme is, like her corruptible count, in riddled with a deep sickness that will prove fatale to the family if given the chance.

Kim takes us into the heart of home here; to the corrupt and blackening core of face-saving family values and the lengths some will go to protect that honour. The film contains epileptic montages and psychedelic shots rendered in lurid rouges, anxious yellows, and cruel blues. Like veins suffocating a stammering heart, the film is pumped irregularly with both arousing reds and de-oxygenated blues; just two of film's curious and stark colourisms that mirrors the film's thumping furiousness and cardiac castrations: "Cut the Human Body and Dark Blood Will Flow" – Kim Ki-young.

The house, although less claustrophobic that the 1960 original, is largely ornate, layered, starkly lit, and possess a rhythm in itself as Kim continually tracks and frames his victims in similar compositions. Characters are often pushed to the edges of the frame or encaged by visual barriers (e.g. widow frames, shelves, screens), and in doing so Kim imprisons his puppets within this haunted house's hold through the frame's cruel and malicious seizing-we are, like the king of this castle, trapped here.

"Woman of Fire" is a hypnotic blend of reassuring realism and Kim's own brand of expressionistic psychedelics. Kim Ki-young has been compared to both Benuel and Hitchcock, but arranged his own meticulous marriage here between surreal abstractions and melodramatic suspense to arrive at numerous provocative and compelling contemplations. The man himself has also been identified as a 'spiritual leader' to this current "generation without mentors"; specifically to modern titans like Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho who have openly cited the legend as such. Kim tragically, and also rather ironically, died in his own Seoul home with his wife when it burned down in 1998, but his cinematic legacy and influence continues to be remembered, examined, and, above all, celebrated.

HanCinema's Classics is a series dedicated to promoting and appreciating classic Korean films. Like many of the films featured here, Kim Ki-young's "Woman of Fire" (1971) can be experienced (with English subtitles) on the Korean Film Archive's YouTube page. It's an amazing free service that provides easy access to over eighty pieces of classic Korean cinema-So go explore, appreciate, and discover the richness of Korea's cinematic past!

- C.J. Wheeler (chriscjw@gmail.com; @KoreaOnTheCouch)