“The commoners get to have all the fun” a lady in waiting laments to her mistress in Lee Jang-ho’s historical drama set in the reign of good king Sejeong, Er Woo Dong: The Entertainer (어우동, Eo Udong). It is however the titular heroine Eoudong’s (Lee Bo-hee) determination to enjoy herself that becomes a threat to the social order, not only in her ability to subvert the Confucianist philosophies of the era by making men her playthings but doing so with those not of noble birth.
Legends seem to surround Euodong, a little more of her history revealed with each step in the investigation into the murder of a man she had slept with at a festival. The man had attempted to rape her, but Eoudong was soon able to gain the upper hand in the situation, realising that he is a servant boy who often visited her home. She sleeps with him willingly, dominating him by getting on top and making it about her pleasure and agency rather than his. Soon after she leaves, however, the boy is killed by an assassin apparently hired by her cruel and perverse husband, who is technically the king’s uncle, to tidy up after her.
Set in 1479, the film is clear in its criticism of the feudal order while insisting that it is the nobles who are the most constrained because they must act by these arcane codes to which the commoners are not subject. The commoners revel at their festival, something more or less forbidden in the revered word of the court and most particularly for a woman like Euodong who craves freedom and excitement, longing to fly like a bird. People of often say of her that should have been born a commoner where her behaviour would not be regarded as so deeply problematic to the social order in its direct attack on notions of class and gender. Though she herself is niece to the prime minister, an assassin (Ahn Sung-ki) is later hired to neuter the threat she poses though there is a kind of care in the unusual request, instructing that death should come suddenly and without pain. Afterwards, the assassin should be sure to bury her in her beautiful place.
The assassin, however also has a painful past in which in which he was quite literally castrated for a similar kind of transgression of class boundaries having become friends with a young noblewoman. While he lost his penis, his friend lost his tongue so that he would never speak of what happened rendering them both outcasts left with no option but to serve the system that had harmed them by becoming spies and assassins. Eoudong’s rebellion is towards this same system, a system in which women are regarded as worthless if they do not serve their proper function. Married at an early age, some recount that Eoudong was once cheerful but less so after her marriage. Her husband rarely visited her and in fact took a concubine but she was still blamed for the “failure” to conceive a child and threatened with the shame of being sent back to her birth family. In this era, a woman was forbidden from remarrying even in widowhood while it was relatively easy for a man to divorce his wife. Simply “talking back” was enough grounds to send a woman packing.
The opening and closing text reminds us that the feudal era was “the hardest time for Korean women” if also perhaps inviting us to consider what our times are like too, insisting that Eoudong lives on in the hearts of oppressed women as one who fiercely resisted the constraints of her era. Lee roots the corruption firmly in the king, who is indeed the patriarch of a nation and presider over an oppressive social order founded on shame and misogyny as a means of maintaining male power. Coloured with the softcore excesses of ‘80s Korean cinema, Lee nevertheless signals the crushing austerity of noble life which slowly erodes the soul in robbing it of emotional fulfilment or individuality saving the artiest of his sex scenes for that between the liberated woman and an emasculated man each betrayed by the society in which they live and seeking the only escape that it presents itself to them.
Windows on Worlds 