My Sassy Girl

(Yeopgijeogin geunyeo)
Kwak Jae-young, South Korea, 2001
3 out of 4 stars

If you are a young Asian person or a young person with Asian friends, there’s a good chance that you have heard someone rave about this film, even though it is not readily available in stores here. I finally had a chance to watch it, and I found it charming, entertaining, and also a bit frustrating, mostly near the end.

What we have here is the purportedly blog-inspired story of a somewhat ineffectual dopey male college student and a drunk girl he meets on the subway. As they fall into some kind of weird relationship, she endlessly terrorizes him with her irrational demands and erratic behavior, but of course, is strangely irresistible as well. I am well aware that Korean film has a reputation for being melodramatic - and even if I wasn’t, some cleverly-integrated parody vignettes gently satirize this trend - and so it is almost with resignation that I anticipated the second half of the film, when things get a bit more serious, and complications ensue (as if “complications” weren’t already built in to the relationship!).

Without question, this is much more nuanced, engaging, and clever than any recent domestic romantic comedy that I can recall, and it will most likely be bled of these qualities when the remake comes around later this year, even if some of the more prolonged melodrama might possibly be excised without too much detriment. Ultimately, however, I think I am being too hard on the final portion of the movie. There are enough interesting developments to sustain interest throughout the second hour of the piece; it’s only really in the last twenty minutes or so (yes, this is a long film) that things started to get repetitive. I guess the point is that for the first hour, it was just a fun film to watch, but near the end, I started to feel more like it was more just a good film to watch with a girl. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.

Source: Starmax DVD
27 February, 8:40 PM