Traces of "Peppermint Candy" in "My Sassy Girl"

I simply love this movie! To me it's Korea's rendition of the classic “chic flick.” Watching it over again for this class with a more analytical point of view has opened my eyes to the many interesting depths this movie takes on. The more I think of the issues of gender identity in this film the more I want to make connects with the movie Peppermint Candy. Although both films are polar opposites in regards to their story lines and mood both Gyeon-Woo's sassy girl and Kim Yong-Ho are struggling to find their identity/normality after having suffered a painful event. 

On the outside Gyeon-Woo's sassy girl is always in control of her environment with her outgoing attitude but on the inside she is conflicted because of the death of her first love and she struggles to become a modern women. The girl struggles to be a part of the new generation of Korean women who, as So-Hee Lee states in her article, “give priority to their identities as sexual beings [and] struggl[e] to conceptualize a sense of individual selfhood [...]” (145). When we, the viewers, get to see the girl in her most vulnerable form, behind her tough talk and sassy ways we see that she is unable to identify herself independently from her first love. She leaves for England to work on her identity, become a modern woman and to “conceptualize a sense of individual selfhood” before being able to truly fall in love with Gyeon-Woo. In this way the sassy girl transitions from the traditional women's identity, which Lee states is dependant on a husband figure, to that of the modern woman. 

 

Both My Sassy Girl and Peppermint Candy deal with themes of broken identity. One important symbol in Peppermint Candy is that of the train which, to a vary degree, is also present in My Sassy Girl. Death by train is present in both movies, but only successfully accomplished in one. Can the trains in both movies be interpreted as having the same symbolic meaning? Are these trains symbols of lost gendered identity or of the search for identity? How? Are trains important symbols of Korean culture? Or is such a comparison between movies too far-fetched?

 So-hee Lee, “The Concept of Female Sexuality in Korean Popular Culture,” in Laura Kendall, ed., Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, 141-164.