my sassy girl

Kwak Jae-young directed the film, “My Sassy Girl” in 2001, which includes the love story of KyeonWoo and the girl (her name never mentioned within the film). This film divides their love stories in three chapters. According to the website, “My sassy girl” was one of the successful in South Korea movie, which was the highest grossing Korean comedy of all time.

In the reading, she mentions, “women of this generation think of themselves a smothers and organize their recollected life experiences around this identity. A women who had assumed rough, assertive ‘masculine’ (namsongjok) behaviour in the defense of her family’s interests was not stigmatized… a “Womenly women” (yoja daun yoja), so defined by her familial, caring, and managerial roles as the female head of an extended household. (Pg. 172, Cho Haejoang). In the film, ‘My sassy girl’, the girl seems ‘masculine’, unlike Oh Seon-Young from the film, ‘Madame freedom’, we watched before. In the film, ‘Madame freedom’, Seon-young asks her husbands before she decides something, however, ‘the girl’ from ‘My sassy girl’ decides whatever she wants to do. For example, whenever she goes to the restaurant with Kyeon Woo, she decides the menu and she makes trouble by ruffle the other customers at the bar (guys who try to statutory rape with the young girls). Additionally, on her birthday, Kyeon Woo brought her to the Seoul land (amusement park), and they met deserter there. If I was on that situation, I would definitely freak-out and call the police right away. However, Jeon Jihyun never freak-out while KyeonWoo did, she even advice to him after she hears about his sad ending love story.

As mentioned above, the female character, Jeon Jihyun from the ‘My Sassy Girl’ is totally different from the female character, Oh SeonYoung from ‘Madame freedom’. “The image of the powerful Korean woman is the product of an aborted and colonized modernity” (pg. 172, Cho Haejoang). It is true that the role of women in South Korea is now changing, but still, audiences can see the male characters are more powerful than women characters. Even in most of dramas includes the love story with the socially powerful plutocrat (jaebol) fall in love with poverty girls. Since the directors spent the Park Chunghee’s regime, most of the successful South Korean dramas or films contains the powerful male character, and poverty or weak female characters.