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Newest Reviews: New Movies - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter Old Movies - Touki Bouki: The Journey of the Hyena The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry Archives - Recap: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 , 2005, 2006, 2007 , 2008 , 2009 , 2010 , 2011 , 2012
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My Sassy Girl (Jae-young Kwak) 2001
* * * 1/2 06-03-02 Jeremy Heilman
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Divided into two disparate parts, Jae-young Kwak’s My
Sassy Girl starts out as a seemingly typical gross out comedy, but it
improves greatly as it proceeds. Based on a real-life anonymous online diary,
this South Korean movie tells the story of Kyun-woo (Tae-hyun Cha), an average,
aimless college student who gets shoved into a relationship with a bossy,
overbearing, and unnamed girl (Ji-hyun Jun) after he’s forced to accompany her
home after she gets drunk and vomits on a subway passenger. Most of the film’s
early scenes mine laughs as they place Kyun-woo in embarrassing situations, and
the film here resembles a descendant of the great slapstick comedies. We watch
as Kyun-woo’s new girlfriend repeatedly humiliates him (any time he crosses
her, she smacks him and asks threateningly, “Do you wanna die?”), but he
tells us in his narration that he continues to pursue her since he suspects
there is an undercurrent of goodness in her. During this segment of the movie,
Kyun-woo is thrown in prison a few times, taken hostage, and publicly
embarrassed because of his involvement with the girl. Since the girl is an
aspiring screenwriter, we also imagine the two in several humorous parodies of
popular film genres, such as the Terminator-style action movie, the
Korean melodrama, and the wu-xia film. These early scenes are engaging, but
hardly revelatory, since they spend as much time trudging through clichés as
overcoming them with inventiveness.
It’s only the second half of the film, which suggests
there’s a real emotional element to their relationship that was only hinted at
in the first half, that My Sassy Girl really takes off. The film becomes
much less scattershot as it begins to find the heart in the girl that Kyun-woo
suspected was there all along. The movie veers toward the melodramatic, as it
trots out a series of surprises and coincidences about her past, but it remains
surprisingly poignant nonetheless. The sense of longing that arises suggests
that much of the conflict between them in the first half of the film was born
out of a combination of their reluctance to get burned by a soured relationship
and their unshakable desire to be in one, and the shift in gears in downright
touching. Whatever small flaws might exist in My Sassy Girl, the
charismatic leads make it more than worthwhile. Jun, in particular, gives a
terrific performance. She’s as lively and impudent as the title suggests, and
she exudes star power whenever she’s on screen. Apparently, My Sassy Girl
is slated to be remade by Dreamworks. Here’s to hoping the producers of the
American version of this special movie realize what it is about it that made it
the top-grossing comedy ever in South Korea.