General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Untold Scandal (스캔들: 조선남녀상열지사)

Untold Scandal (스캔들: 조선남녀상열지사, Seukaendeul: Joseon-namnyeo-sangyeoljisa) is a 2003 South Korean period drama directed by E J-yong that adapts Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, moving its story of seduction and betrayal from aristocratic France to late 18th-century Joseon Korea.¹^•² It stars Bae Yong-joon as the playboy nobleman Jo-won, Lee Mi-sook as the scheming Lady Cho, and Jeon Do-yeon as the chaste widow Lady Sook, and it was one of the most-watched Korean films of 2003.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Korean title	스캔들: 조선남녀상열지사 (Scandal: Joseon namnyeo sangyeoljisa)
Director and screenplay	E J-yong; screenplay by Kim Dae-woo, E J-yong, and Kim Hyun-jeong¹
Source	Adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), transposed to the Joseon dynasty¹
Principal cast	Bae Yong-joon (Jo-won), Lee Mi-sook (Lady Cho), Jeon Do-yeon (Lady Sook), Lee So-yeon (So-ok), Jo Hyun-jae (Kwon In-ho)¹
Release	October 2, 2003, South Korea; 124 minutes, 35mm, adults only¹^•⁴
Admissions	3,345,268 nationwide and 1,293,642 in Seoul per one record; a government policy report lists 3,522,747¹^•⁵
Awards	Costume prize at the 41st Grand Bell Awards; art and costume prizes at the 2003 Blue Dragon Film Awards⁴^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The film keeps the skeleton of Laclos's novel. Lady Cho, who lives outwardly as a model Confucian wife while secretly enjoying conquests of men, asks her cousin Jo-won, reputedly the most famous womanizer in the country, to seduce So-ok, the young virgin brought into her husband's household as a concubine.⁴^•⁷ Jo-won, however, sets his sights on Lady Sook, a widow who has kept chastity for nine years and been granted an official gate honoring her virtue, the yeolnyeomun.⁴ The wager between the two conspirators drives a drama of erotic gamesmanship, jealousy, betrayal, and revenge.²

The Guardian's festival review maps the characters onto the novel directly: Jo-won is the rendering of Laclos's Valmont, and Lady Cho his Marquise de Merteuil, who goads him into a double seduction of a 16-year-old concubine-to-be and a 27-year-old virgin.⁸ A subplot involving underground Catholics, absent from the French original, adds a note of religious risk to the Confucian setting.⁹^•¹⁰

Production and design

The film was a large-scale production for Korean cinema of its time. Cine21 reported a budget of 6.5 billion won; the Korean Cinema Database entry puts the cost at 4.5 billion won against 1.2 million admissions counted on one chart, adding that the film recouped its cost through overseas sales driven by Bae Yong-joon's popularity in Japan and elsewhere in Asia.¹¹^•⁶ The Korean Film Archive notes that the art department alone spent about 2 billion won on sets and props, with pre-production lasting ten months, to reproduce Joseon architecture and dress with strict historical verification.⁴

Costume as characterization. Costume designer Kim Hee-ju and production designer Jung Koo-ho created about 100 jeogori jackets, dyed by hand from raw silk, mohwa fabric, and cotton and finished with hand stitching, work that won the costume prize at the 41st Grand Bell Awards.⁴ The wardrobe encodes the two women's opposition: the bold Lady Cho wears brilliant red and purple jackets, while the reserved Lady Sook wears white, offset by a red scarf that hints at the passion beneath her virtue.⁴ Costumes and props were exhibited at the Korean Film Museum when it opened in 2008.⁴

Cinematographer Kim Byung-il described the visual approach in a 2003 Cine21 interview: E J-yong demanded that film, camera, hanbok, and other elements be rendered in extremely primary colors without filters or added manipulation, a practice Kim said he had never used before; only a midnight-blue filter for one rooftop scene and a fog filter for a panorama of Hanyang were permitted.¹² The score was composed by Lee Byeong-woo.¹³

Release and reception

The film opened in South Korea on October 2, 2003, distributed by CJ Entertainment, and drew 3,345,268 admissions nationwide according to the Koreanfilm.org data sheet; a 2006 government policy report lists the total as 3,522,747.¹^•⁵ It was released in Japan on May 21, 2004, earning about 5.5 million dollars, and in North America on October 13, 2004, earning 42,344 dollars.¹

On the festival circuit it screened at the 2004 Edinburgh International Film Festival, where it was elevated to the closing gala after Wong Kar-wai's 2046 was withdrawn.⁸ Metacritic records a generally favorable score of 73 from 18 critic reviews, with Grand Bell Awards results of 1 win and 11 nominations, Blue Dragon Awards results of 2 wins and 6 nominations, and 3 wins and 4 nominations at the Shanghai International Film Festival.¹⁴ Domestic critical response at release was mixed: praise for the craft recognized in the Blue Dragon art and costume prizes coexisted with criticism of uneven narrative rhythm.⁶

Reviewers abroad divided over the film's tone. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian called it a deadpan remake without the roguery and high-campery of Stephen Frears's 1988 version, replacing comic sauciness with glacial eroticism and tragedy, and suggested it might be the most persuasive of the screen adaptations.¹⁵ The Deseret News found it lacked the dark humor of the Frears film but praised its broader perspective, including material on the introduction of Western religion into Confucian Korea, and noted it was surprisingly sympathetic toward its female characters.¹⁰ Slant Magazine, by contrast, judged the film gorgeous but hollow, with little to say about the culture war and battle of the sexes documented in the novel.¹⁶

Place in Korean and world cinema

A 2016 study in the journal Spanish Latin American Research records that the film was the first screen adaptation of the Don Juan myth in the East Asian cultural sphere, with Jo-won as a Joseon-era rebirth of the character.¹⁷ Scholars of Korean heritage cinema have treated it as a sageuk (historical drama) that comments on Korea's past and present through a pastiche of Western heritage-film tropes.¹⁸ Film at Lincoln Center included it in its 2019 series "Relentless Invention: New Korean Cinema, 1996–2003," a survey of the essential films of that movement.²

The story returned to the screen as a Netflix series directed by Jung Ji-woo, starring Son Ye-jin, Ji Chang-wook, and Nana, released on September 18, 2026; the painter Yun Yeong-hwan, who made the portrait props for the 2003 film, painted a new portrait for the series, rejoining the property 23 years later.¹⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2000s › Romantic drama films 2000s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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