SPEC D: Park Chan-wook. South Korea. 145 min. Sep 10, 9:30 pm, Elgin Sep 11, 8:30 pm, Scotiabank 2. Rating: NN
Park Chan-wook has turned Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith into an exercise in soft porn. To his credit, the pic is beautiful, and he deals cleverly with some of the elements in the source material: when petty thief Sookee (Kim Tae-ri) and Count Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) set out to defraud wealthy shut-in Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), the two women fall in love.
But where Waters specializes in the tantalizingly suggestive, Park goes all-out in series of gratuitous, nearly explicit, sex scenes. That’s not in itself such a bad thing, but when he opts for a severely sadistic sequence near the end, he goes too far.
