Review: Untold Scandal

Lee Je-yong’s film has very little to say about a culture war and a battle of the sexes.

Untold Scandal
Photo: Kino International

Yet another soulless adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, except this time the non-stop scheming and humping takes place in 18th-century South Korea within a closely-knit community of royals. Director Lee Je-yong clearly takes pleasure in perverting the film’s polite society but doubts via the opening narration that his promiscuous and immoral characters even existed. Of course they didn’t, but that’s not to say that similar such people didn’t live during the Chosun dynasty.

It’s a cowardly opener because it allows the filmmakers to indiscriminately subvert a time period but hypocritically evade criticism by stating that Chosun royals were too good to be driven by seduction and revenge. The universal appeal of Les Liaisons Dangereuses is easy to explain (audiences love a good catfight, right?), but it’s amazing how little films like Valmont and Untold Scandal have to say about their respective cultures of mean.

Save for the Confucian spiritual crisis that consumes the young widow (Jeon Do-yeon) targeted by the aristocratic Jo-won (Bae Yong-jun) and Madame Jo (Lee Mi-suk), Untold Scandal starves for cultural specificity. From the dramatic overheads of ostentatious dinner sequences to the sumptuous silk clothing everyone wears, the film is gorgeous but ultimately hollow.

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De Laclos’s 18th-century epistolary novel documents both a culture war and a battle of the sexes, but no amount of food or layers of clothing can disguise the fact that Untold Story, with its coy spectacle of prissy sex and unexamined back-stabbings, has very little to say about both topics. Who would have thought that Roger Kumble’s delightfully campy Cruel Intentions was the film to come closest to capturing the essence of the original novel?

Score: 
 Cast: Bae Yong-jun, Lee Mi-suk, Jeon Do-yeon, Jo Hyeon-jae, Lee So-yeon, Kim Ha-kyeong  Director: Lee Je-yong  Screenwriter: Kim Dae-woo, Kim Hyeon-jeong, Lee Je-yong  Distributor: Kino International  Running Time: 124 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2003  Buy: Video

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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