My Sassy Girl deceptively portrays the female lead character as having a modern stance
on gender roles, for she is never shown to care about social norms with regards
to women’s looks and their behavior toward men. The girl is also abusive and
extremely moody, which are the predominant characteristics that make her attractive
to Gyeon Woo. At the same time, however, the female lead is never given a name
and she follows around Gyeon in hopes of replacing the memory of her deceased
ex-boyfriend, thus hopelessly in need of affection and a man to heal her
wounds. The film’s ending seems to be, in So-hee Lee’s words, “artificially orchestrated
toward an inevitable outcome” in which Gyeon and his sassy girl coincidentally
end up together. According to Lee this is typical of Korean romantic comedies
which, although attempting to deviate from traditional gender roles, end up
enforcing an omnipresent patriarchal ideology.
What
surprised me the most about the film is that it received widespread positive
reviews, which caused it to become the most commercially successful comedy in
Korea. The female lead struck me as an object in need of repair, with a
boyfriend as the only entity that can save her. Despite the fact that the film
was released in 2001, following a period of emerging social discourse on Korean
female sexuality that began in 1995 (according to Lee), My Sassy Girl does
not appear to depict the new individualistic and self-reliant vision of ‘woman’
that appears in Haejoang Cho’s essay. Instead, the film seems to focus on the
idea that woman needs man and man needs woman, thus completely eliminating the
possibility for a revision of gender dynamics.
Had this
film been a melodrama instead of a romantic comedy though, would the ending
have been different, and if so, how would this have changed the film’s
presentation of the supremacy of patriarchy?
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