UNTOLD SCANDAL Directed by EJ Yong
Certificate 18

FROM The Ring to The Grudge, remakes of east Asian blockbusters have become a Hollywood staple in recent years – but it’s not so often that the favour is returned.
As anyone who has seen Throne of Blood, Japanese master Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 breathtaking version of Macbeth, knows moving a well-known fable to a foreign culture often draws out its universal themes better than any ‘authentic’ production could.
Kurosawa’s samurai Macbeth is a far better film than Roman Polanski’s better-known Playboy-backed version of 1971, even if Polanski’s cast did don chain mail and prat about in the highlands for months.
Likewise, Untold Scandal, Korean director E J-Yong’s take on Dangerous Liaisons, gets on just fine without John Malkovich, Glenn Close, Michelle Pfieffer and a dozen gilded Parisian ballrooms.
Moving the action to aristocratic 18th-century Korea, he introduces western audiences to an unfamiliar but rigidly ordered world, where women wear extravagant head-dresses and live in hidden quarters, forbidden from openly conversing with men. If the setting is unfamiliar, the story is the same; behind the stiff formalities and customs, everyone’s at it. Bae Yong-Jun, in the John Malkovich role, makes a bet with Lee Mi-Sook in the part made famous by Glenn Close: if he can’t bed chaste widow Jeon Do-Yeon (the one played by Michelle Pfeiffer), he’ll become a monk; if he can, she has to sleep with him.
Young lovers Jeon Do-Yeon and Cho Hyeon-Jae are corrupted as the older pair jealously scheme against each other.
It’s all beautifully and thoughtfully shot and the $6 million budget, minuscule by Hollywood standards, is all on the screen in the incredible period costumes and sets.The usual art house crowd should be supplemented by the dirty mac brigade, too, as there’s plenty of nudity and sex, which the distributors will doubtless play up.
I hope they do – it deserves to be a hit.