A love story that wasn't supposed to work, DAVID LEVINSON came this close to crying by the end of My Sassy Girl. He reviews as part of Lumière's Korean Film Festival 2005 coverage.


IN THEORY, this movie should not work – at all. Its premise comes from the same dark, scary place that spawned something like Il Mare, and there's a part of me that still wants to put my enjoyment down to a certain emotional vulnerability that I was experiencing at the time. I mean, it's set to a sonic mash-up of K-pop, sparkly, piano-laden riffs, and a two-times use of Pachelbel's canon, that hangs awkwardly like an overweight dragon; the two leads look like they're Ralph Lauren pin-ups; a pivotal emotional through-point cribs wholesale from Before Sunrise; it features a scene in which a woman vomits all over an elderly man's head; and, in the end, what we learn is the equivalent of listening to a power ballad: Love conquers all and Destiny will find a way.

But, like they say, the destination is only half the point, and something must've happened on the way to the factory where sentiments are fashioned out of plasticine – presumably that Kwak Jae-young took a detour and discovered Linklater. Theoretically, of course (well, aside from that whole thing about "crib[bing] wholesale from Before Sunrise"). But what's so thrilling isn't simply that this film contains some of the most emotionally self-aware lovers-on-the-brink since, well, Before Sunrise. It's the fact that they spring up in such a garish set of boundaries, proceeding to hijack the serviette scrawl of a premise through sheer force of will. It's cinematic alchemy at its finest, the kind that needles with the pleasure of having discovered something like this in here of all places, the kind where rough-edged ambition cuts through pop gleam, the kind where any missteps feel like an organic part of the learning process.

Broken into two halves, the division mirrors the way the relationship between boy and girl slowly mutates from romantic jousting into a walk-in closet of psychological hang-ups. First meeting over the aforementioned vomit, she's a post-feminist pin-up taken to 11; and with the courting process having been so thoroughly smashed up beyond recognition, any dissatisfaction on her part is met with the casual affront, "Do you wanna die?" He's equally disjointed, wrapped in the twin tendrils of unflagging goodwill and cowering emasculation; their time spent together becomes a kind of endurance test for his ability to stand public humiliation.

Watching them perform flip-flops through gender norms, I couldn't help but think back to my experience with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the way I made some comment about how often my enjoyment of a romantic film is directly proportional to the degree to which I fell in love with the female lead. And while, admittedly, there were times where I was just about ready to give up on the Girl and her near-psychotic spasms, that stance now feels kinda immature, making for an interesting parallel in the way Kyun-woo is forced to learn how to genuinely connect.

Kwak's chameleon-like handle on the material becomes more apparent during the second half, the movement between the two guided by a birthday bonanza showdown at an amusement park: what begins with the promise of a starlit symphony ends with the sound of the orchestra beating one another over the head with their instruments (proverbially, of course), as Kyun-woo is taken hostage by a deranged ex-military man. The scene itself doesn't really work – tonally unsure of itself, turning heartbreak into cheap spectacle – but it sets the course that the rest of the film will follow: during negotiations with the kidnapper, the Girl tells him that "A person like you should learn more about love," and its something that takes the other two a small range of crescendos to finally figure out. What makes all the emotional amplitude work is a) Kwak's decision to finally end on a coda that's gently unassuming, and b) the way he plants the relationship on a gliding spectrum, allowing for feelings to snowball in a way that takes them by surprise as much it does us. Fact is, the film openly acknowledges the stupidityanxietyawkwardness that can accompany love in its cocoon stages, not in the aw-shucks-I-think-you're-swell sense, but in the relationship as a sort of crutch sense, he casting himself as the man to "cure her grief" and she trying to fill in the space left by a past love. It's not exactly psychology of astounding depth, but at least takes into account the possibility of ulterior motives, which often feel bypassed. And they get together in the end, of course – with the sense that each has genuinely grown as a part of the process. If that's not enough for you, you're probably an android and should know that I came this | | close to crying.


See also:
» Once Upon a Time in High School
» Taegukgi
» K-Shorts: Failan, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Untold Scandal