Twenty-five years ago this week, Kwak Jae-young’s game-changing My Sassy Girl exploded into South Korean cinemas. A surprise blockbuster at home and across the region, it resonated with audiences by radically subverting traditional gender stereotypes, driven by star-making performances from Jun Ji-hyun and Cha Tae-hyun.
Adapted from a series of supposedly autobiographical blog posts first published in 1999 by Kim Ho-sik, My Sassy Girl sees a hapless, mollycoddled engineering student, Gyun-woo (Cha), become involved with an aggressive, hard-drinking young woman (Jun) – who remains unnamed – after inadvertently saving her from falling onto the subway tracks.
A far cry from the submissive, demure depictions of idealised femininity prevalent and encouraged throughout South Korean society at the time, “the girl” – as she is known – is bossy, outspoken and violent.
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