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Park Chan-wook has chosen his first film project since his English-language debut film Stoker. The director will be returning to South Korea for his follow-up movie that will be an adaptation of Sarah Waters‘ 2002 novel Fingersmith.
The story is set in Victorian London, and it focuses on young women are who work as petty thieves called "fingersmiths”. This isn't the first time the book has been adapted. Back in 2005 the BBC made a two-part miniseries, which is where the photo above comes from.
Park's version of the story will be set in Korea sometime during the Japanese occupation (1910 – 1945). Casting is currently underway, and production is set to begin in the first half of 2015. Here's the synopsis for Waters’ novel that gives you a better more detailed description of the story.
Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a “baby farmer,” who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home.
One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum.
With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways…But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.
This will be a great project for Park who has directed other great films such as Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, and Thirst.
