Yas!
Japan has finally come out with their support for The Handmaiden! They had me worried there for a minute, but then I remembered that it took them a whole year to get ‘A Girl At My Door’ and my worries were buried!
And of course you know what this means! There is sure to be a Blu-ray for Ojou-san (The Japanese title for Ahgassi)! Yes, I know there is a a Blu-ray from Hong Kong but there is no way I am going to be satisfied with that kind of product! No additional material except a trailer, putting a movie as beautiful as this, a movie that relies on the visual cues in the story telling almost more than any other aspect, to take that kind of movie and squeeze it onto a BD25!!?! Get out of here! And that is not all! The FPS are all screwed up speeding up the movie to a mere 140min instead of the official 144! I know this is a thing but I have never come across it and I have bought versions of the same movie from different regions so this is not cool!
I am getting the Blu-ray though.
Yes, my mission of buying all versions of this movie on Blu-ray still stands! Even ‘Murica which is disappointing us by not giving us a Blu-ray (Seriously Sony?!!! You better be planning on that 4K version or so God of Yuri help me I’ll…)
Eh, thank God Japan is here to save the day! I am also pretty sure that Plain Archives is gonna deliver the greatest thing to ever grace the blue disc! I signed up to that company just to get that notification of Ahgassi’s Ultimate Collectors Edition! Put in 6 discs and sell it for a grand I will still get it dammit!
But back to Japan, I am not even kidding when I say that I had a dream that the version they released was the 3hrs3m Director’s Cut version! I even remember that the opening scene was actually the sex scene (the teach me how to have sex scene) and I know that is improbable to start a movie like that but hey, Fingersmith is one story that can be told in different ways, which has actually happened already in both adaptations taking a different approach.
Anyway, Japan just released a trailer for Ojou-san and dear Readers is it intense!! You thought the French Trailer was hard-core? Wait till you get a hold of this one! Of course it might be that it is because most have already seen it and so they are not afraid of spoiling but it might also be because Japan is marketing what the movie actually is! All other countries, bar France, have left out the intensity of the intimacy which put some people off who went in not expecting those out of this world sex scenes!
Japan and France on the other hand are telling it as it is! Hell, japan even is going so far as to put the R-18 in front and centre. This is an extreme movie! I remember being super taken by surprise when I read Fingersmith the first time and that first sex scene happened! You can imagine too that if I was shocked by something like that, a totally watered down view on sex only picked up by those able to link the words and everything, imagine what this movie could have done to those who had not even read the book, or did but the intensity of the sex scenes in the book totally went over their heads.
Actually, one of the things the movie is superior to the book for me is the depiction of the sex scenes. Watching the movie and reading the book you wonder what was going on with Madam Waters. Was she trying to hide the intensity within the words and trippy descriptions, was it supposed to be less intense? Did she just not know how to describe a sex scene?
Now, to be fare the visuals helped the movie greatly and the BBC version was somewhat better thus father proving the point but even then those were nowhere close to the movie scenes level of intensity! And since the BBC was essentially the closest to the book we will ever get, well then, Mr Park sure did a terrific job on that.
Anddddd where was I again? There I go getting distracted from the topic at hand.
Anyway, jump over for more caps from the trailer and the trailer itself on YT. Sadly we have to wait until maybe fall for this Blu-ray or maybe late summer 2017 since the movie is hitting Japanese theatres in March but I know it will have been worth it. I so love the Blu-ray for ‘Watashi no Shoujo’ AKA ‘A Girl At My Door’. Japan is the only country that gave it a Blu-ray, which baffles my mind seeing as it is one of the winners at the 2014 Cannes but alas!
百合 Goggles 