Teaser poster for Park Chan-wook's next film No Other Choice, starring Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin

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He lost his Hindu-originated name “Arun” when he was trafficked from Dehli as a child, was renamed “Amadeo” by his paedophile Maker the vampire Marius, then finally assigned “Armand” by the Roman coven before they sent him to France. He’s also lost his voice in a way, shown code-switching and adopting different accents in different settings. Throughout world history, colonised peoples have often been forced to adopt the languages and names of their oppressive colonisers as a way to erase their cultural identities.

Armand’s history was essentially colonised. His personal sexual trauma is an allegory for wider colonial trauma. This idea was explored similarly in Park Chan-wook’s 2016 film The Handmaiden, where the character Hideko’s forced exposure to pornographic Japanese literature as a child is meant to parallel the colonial oppression of the Japanese occupation of Korea.

The only evidence remaining of Armand’s experiences of sexual and colonial violence is this painting The Adoration of the Shephards With a Donor that hangs in the Louvre. Another cruel irony here is that ‘Adoration of the Shepherds’ is an episode of Jesus’s nativity. Arun as a (presumably) Hindu boy was used as a prop in a Christian narrative. The one historical document that exists of his mortal life is a depiction of his religious assimilation. Completely divorced from his roots, with no identity outside the roles his abusers assigned him, Armand, Amadeo, and Arun “were cut loose and dead like children turned to stone.” Being immortalised, “donated”, and placed on display in a European museum, a space he’s not even really allowed to access, for the mostly-white gaze is a clear metaphor for colonisers’ persisting theft of cultural artefacts belonging to their victims.

The only consolation this journey has for Armand is creative inspiration. He took Amadeo, trapped in the horror of his youth for the entertainment of others, and transferred that idea into the play My Baby Loves Windows to torture Claudia.

park chan-wook without jeong seo-kyeong

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