The Racy Film That Rocked South Korea

In 1982, conservative South Korean society was surprised by Madame Aema, a highly erotic film directed by In-yeob Jeong that pushed the theatrical boundaries of the nascent domestic film industry, and was so massively popular it prompted nine sequels. Over six hour-long episodes, Netflix’s new series Aema dramatizes the story of how Madame Aema came to be made.

Madame Aema is, in retrospect, not considered great art. Despite its massive box office and significance to the history of South Korean film, the Korean Film Archive does not have an English-subtitled version on its YouTube channel because of its sleazy reputation. The Korean Film Archive did produce a restored version at one point, they just don’t like to talk about it these days. For those nostalgic for the late nineties DVDs rips that characterized the First Korean Wave, there’s also a commercially distributed version.

All of which is to say that Madame Aema is a legitimate cultural artifact. Most South Koreans have at least heard the name Madame Aema, even if only in the same vague sense Americans might be familiar with Love Story. That is to say, it is deeply parodied on account of the film being a huge blockbuster back in its heyday, so everyone at least knows the parodies. All of this is excellent grist for a miniseries, regardless of the angle. So it was with some bewilderment that I watched Aema and realized that this series is not even an attempt at a serious docudrama, but a complete fictionalization of the production of Madame Aema, one that goes so far as to change the names and the personal stories of all the actual people involved — probably for the sake of avoiding lawsuits.

While I knew that Madame Aema wasn’t an especially well-regarded film aesthetically, I’m still a little surprised after watching Aema to realize that so many people in the South Korean media industry apparently regard it with such genuine contempt. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for why Lee Hae-young even made this series. Madame Aema — the film within the show — no longer portrays the characters the original took from its namesake novel, instead making its script largely a product of unprovoked perverted ramblings. Aside from the horses, the few unique elements the 1982 film actually displayed, are cast aside for generic melodrama. The cast and crew of the fictionalized Madame Aema are also not played as if they were serious professionals used to working within a complex system, but amateurs and prima donnas victimized by CEO Goo.

While CEO Goo, played by Jin Seon-kyu of Space Sweepers, is the villain of Aema he is also, somewhat bizarrely, the only character with a coherent vision of what Madame Aema should be — a sex flick. He bullies all the other characters into making the movie bad instead of arty because he’s a bad person. The gender politics of Aema aren’t exactly subtle. The show is quite literally bookended by scenes of actresses reading scripts that make egregious reference to heaving bosoms. Weirdly, despite romantic melodramas like Madame Aema typically being stereotyped as a woman’s genre, Aema goes so far as to state that only men could possibly have any interest in these kinds of stories. Our heroine Hee-ran, played by Lee Hanee of Alienoid, undertakes an elaborate effort to nurture the naive young actress Joo-ae, played by Bang Hyo-rin, to turn Madame Aema into more of a woman’s movie. She pushes rewrites that let their characters give up on the “disease” that is men so they can ride their horses together into the sunset.

I’m bothered less by the extremity of these anachronisms than I am by just how genuinely weird Aema is, in how it takes for granted that if there’s anything women hate, it’s seeing a sexually attractive man on screen who the heroine swoons for. The people who made Aema seemed to believe they were being feminist, but I’m not sure it really occurred to them in the context of the early eighties. Madame Aema had as much feminist attitude as you could really get into a mainstream film. The problem wasn’t really whether the producers were sexist, the problem was that — almost ten years before Thelma and Louise — there wasn’t any kind of blueprint for the kind of smash-the-patriarchy hoes-before-bros story that Aema treats as a platonic ideal.

That’s the part of Aema that annoys me the most — it’s lazy and offensively cartoonish. It literally invents a fake version of a real movie to get mad at instead of making any effort to understand the historical circumstances of film production in South Korea at that time. The 2023 South Korean film Cobweb, featuring Parasite‘s Song Kang-ho and free to watch on Amazon Prime, is a similar movie to this one, but with a much better grasp of the era that allows it to be authentic despite often devolving to absurdity at times even greater than that in Aema. The arguments over creative differences are far more convincing, rather paradoxically, because both sides are treated as having legitimate points. The characters are impulsive and a little bit crazy precisely because those are the kinds of people drawn to film-making, and there’s genuine affection for the tropes of that era that goes a long way to explaining why audiences ever found this kind of weirdness to be appealing.

Aema is more of a funhouse mirror by comparison, a twisted distorted memory of South Korean film production in the ’80s that neatly, but inaccurately, divides the major players into good girls and bad guys, robbing all of them of any meaningful depth in the process. Worst of all, though, is knowing that audiences in South Korea or elsewhere will inevitably confuse the fictionalized Madame Aema with the real one. In the end, that’s the cruelest thing Aema does to the legacy of Madame Aema: it overwrites it with something worse.