“The first thing that struck me was how faithful it manages to be to Fingersmith even though it’s in Korean and Japanese and set in a different period,” says Waters. “I was very interested in the texture of Victorian life, and the power dynamics were played out in a material way, and I think he’s brought a similar interest in artefacts and fabrics. It’s such a crowdedly lush film, with all those shoes and gloves and corsets.”
It is atmospherically set in a mansion which is part western gothic, part Japanese, with rooms divided by sliding paper doors through which the unscrupulous can snoop on the unwary. Like the castles of classic gothic literature, both novel and film create spaces in which the normal order can be subverted. “Those buildings with rooms after rooms after rooms are psychic structures,” Waters observes. “They echo social structures: public or semi-public spaces, then private, then secret spaces.”
