‘Aema’ is a watchable, if misguided, misfire

It’s a sequence that caps an inconsistent and occasionally compelling beginning for Aema, which—segmented into just six parts—is the first South Korean original to fit comfortably into Netflix’s mandate for short series. It’s also a sign of what Aema could have been.

Written and directed by Lee Hae-young, Aema traces the production of 1982’s Madame Aema and offers an ahistorical retelling of its aftermath. The film released two years after then President Chun Doo-hwan usurped power in the wake of former dictator Park Chung-hee’s assassination. An insecure government attempting to distract from its own instability and authoritarianism invested in culture, specifically taking a more lenient view of depictions of sex. 

In a South Korean cinema pushed to the brink by censorship and the rise of television, Madame Aema was the first film to test what was permissible under laxer control with its near-pornographic take on erotica. This made it the highest-grossing South Korean film of 1982, spawning a string of sequels up to 2016, and inspiring a wave of erotic South Korean cinema throughout the 1980s.

Lee casts Jeong Hee-ran (Lee Ha-nee) as an actress at her zenith, who uses her fame to attempt an escape from a string of risqué roles. Locked into a contract with Shinsung Pictures that demands one final film, however, she is forcibly cast in Kwak In-u’s (Cho Hyun-chul) Madame Aema. Her attempts to sabotage the movie and bring a more artistic alternative to Shinsung only lead to slimy studio president Ku Jung-ho (Jin Sun-kyu) demoting her to a supporting role, and elevating newcomer Ju-ae to the lead.

Ju-ae is dazzled by Hee-ran, but the latter has only contempt for the ingénue usurping her. Though, something more than dislike is motivating Hee-ran. As her cold shoulder evaporates, we learn that it’s only a defense mechanism against reliving her own exploitation by South Korean cinema and seeing yet another young woman forced through the mill of its misogynistic industry. But as Ju-ae rejects that exploitation, rivalry thaws to a careful solidarity that, Aema suggests, will shake-up the conservative status-quo.

It’s a fanciful tale. One that could have been an effective drama in steadier hands. Though Aema embraces some of the history of Madame Aema, especially highlighting that this purported lenient censorship was anything but, history remains a loose framework for Lee’s fiction. While moments like the mirage of celebrity being violently wrenched from Ju-ae are affecting, and both Lee and Bang shine in co-lead roles, they are persistently undermined by the discomfort with which Lee Hae-young treats both women and sex—through which Aema shares much with 2024’s A Virtuous Business, defined by a similar embarrassment towards women’s sexuality—but also its inspiration.

Madame Aema, important though it is to South Korea’s cinematic history, is an almost plotless midnight movie. Though Lee captures its sense of timing—a late-night movie opening just as a new government lifts a decades-long curfew—he consistently refuses to meet South Korea’s longest-running cinematic series on its own merits. Instead, he fabricates a history to ascribe to Madame Aema a greater creative and narrative meaning. The film we see is, according to Aema, lost behind a seedy edit that strips Madame Aema of much of its artistic merit. The film’s director in the series, Kwak, is removed from the libidinous men around him and cast instead as a tortured feminist visionary at odds with the comical men through which Lee communicates a broader embarrassment about sex.

That’s not to suggest that humor is inappropriate and that Madame Aema should be treated with funereal profundity. There is genuine comedy to be found in the film’s production, not least in the absurdity of creating eroticism in the least erotic of environments: a film set. Lee prefers to take unsteady aim at the men behind the film, in particular Ku, who frequently cups imaginary breasts while yelling that the film needs to make men hard. It’s a defensible creative choice to heap contempt on men the series identifies as essentially selling young actresses like Ju-ae. Rather than pathetic, however, Lee makes these men slapstick clowns; to the point that it too often feels like we’re expected to laugh with, rather than at, them—specifically at sex and the women portraying it.

For as much as Aema lionizes Ju-ae’s refusal to sleep her way to the top and Hee-ran’s ongoing rebellion, it has enormous reserves of disdain for every other woman caught in the system without the privilege of lead roles in box office smashes. Lee sweeps a judgemental eye at any woman who must embrace and perpetuate the culture of exploitation, who uses their body for their own benefit, who is dazzled by the excess, and especially those who don’t embody the girlboss attitude with which he imbues his leads.

Context of groups like Yeonghuihoe, Kaidu Club, and Bariteo—women-led filmmaking collectives spanning the 1970s and into the late-1980s—may have offset this queasy framing, providing a stark contrast to Lee’s perpetually teenaged men and supplementing a more sincere study of women in the industry. Lee instead places the rise of cine-feminism in South Korea in the wake of Madame Aema alone and, ironically, in the hands of a film made by, and for, men.

It’s a shame, as Aema remains a watchable if absurd drama; one that devolves in its second half into an implausibility and ahistoricism even casual viewers will question. But in rewriting history, and women’s experiences, all Lee conjures with Aema is a view of female empowerment from a squarely male perspective that is a disservice to both past and present.