Guests Archive / KWAK JAE-YONG
KWAK JAE-YONG
Name in korean:
곽재용
Name pronunciation:
gwag jae-yong
Profession:
Director
Date of Birth:
22 Maggio 1959
Gender:
Man
Biography
Kwak Jae-yong was born in 1959, and is a director, screenwriter and producer. Graduated in Physics from the University of Kyunghee, he made his feature film debut in 1989 with Watercolor Painting in a Rainy Day, of which he directed a sequel four years later. But it is with its return to the scene, many years later, My Sassy Girl, that Kwak achieves extraordinary success with audiences: the film is not only one of the highest grossing in the history of Korean cinema, with more than four and a half million spectators (although that same year Friend exceeds eight), but a consolidated narrative model ready to be replicated, built around the figure of a "cheeky" girl, masculine and always accompanied by a yielding and in love male. My Sassy Girl won the Grand Prix in the Young Fantastic Section at the Yubari Int'l Fantastic Film Festival, the Best Screenplay Award at the Daejong Film Awards and the Asia Film Award at the Hong Kong Film Awards. The following year he wrote the screenplay for The Romantic President, by Jeon Man-bae, and returned to directing with The Classic, an update on the theme of My Sassy Girl, which earned him the Most Popular Film Award at Yubari (a festival in which he returned in 2003 as a member of the jury of the Young Fantastic Section that had decreed his success). He returns to collaborate with actress Jeon Ji-hyun for a new romantic comedy, Windtruck (2004), in co-production with Hong Kong. Also in 2004 he wrote the screenplay for Ark, a computer animated film, directed by Kenny Hwange, animated by Digital Rim, and produced by John Woo, on the model of Final Fantasy. He continued his activity as a screenwriter first with Jeon Yun-su's My Girl and I (2005) (which is a remake of the Japanese film Socrates in Love), then with Daisy (2006), a classic melodrama directed by Andrew Lau, the author of the Infernal Affairs trilogy. In 2007 he directed The Mighty Princess, which is strongly influenced by the Hong Kong imagery on which the director has been nourished in recent years: the world of wuxia and martial arts films is added to the basis of teenage romantic comedy. In 2008 he further broadened his production horizon and cinematographic imagery, making a Japanese film, Cyborg She, in which the figure of the "terrible" girl hybridizes with science fiction imagery. Also in 2008 he collaborated with Tsui Hark on the writing of All About Women, a Chinese romantic comedy, conceived as an update of Peking Opera Blues by the Hong Kong director.
Critique
We cannot talk about Kwak Jae-young's cinema if not starting from, or at least around, My Sassy Girl: the story of the young student who is good and generous with women, who has the only "misfortune" of meeting a drunk girl on the subway, and falling in love (but could he do the opposite? Perhaps he would hear the answer: "do you want to die?") of her, has become a real international case. In the not-so-fresh landscape of romantic comedy in recent years, My Sassy Girl has proved to be a pan-Asian phenomenon, as it dominated the charts not only at home, but also in Hong Kong, turning its lead actress into a star. As has often happened in the recent film scene, the phenomenon has crossed continental levels and, after the rights passed from Dreamwork to Turner, the film was the subject of an American remake. Moreover, rather weak, and all professional, entrusted to Yann Samuell (little more than a newcomer) and with Elisha Cuthbert (face and body of a number of teen movies, from horror to romantic, and especially of the television series 24) in the role of the character who made the fortune of Jun Ji-hyun. Yet it is already amazing in itself that the American blockbuster film market has decided to expand the boundaries of its "remake faculty" even beyond the universe of horror or action (genres traditionally easier to transmigrate from one socio-cultural universe to another), and has tried to adapt a narrative format as complex to translate (because it is so closely linked to the national imagination) as the romantic comedy. The secret is all in the "secret formula" that Kwak has managed to put at the base of his cinema: in a world panorama currently dominated at worst by products built with mathematical rigor à la Richard Curtis, or at best by the sympathetic but often inconclusive experiences of the Farrellys, the "Kwak model", manages to rape for the fantastic realism and truth of the characters. In fact, there is something of the malaise of adolescence and the transition to adulthood, of the simple inconclusiveness and inscrutability of chance, which Kwak's films manage to translate immediately, even if filtered through the lens of the grotesque (My Sassy Girl), the historical and memorial fresco (The Classic), the supernatural drama (Windstruck), the supernatural in a wuxia key (My Mighty Princess) or scifi (Cyborg She). But everything, once again, originates with My Sassy Girl, and with the debut of this debut: the meeting between the two heroes, between the student unable to find a reason for his destiny and with the young neurotic alcoholic. As in Time and Tide by Tsui Hark (who is a director extremely close to Kwak, to the point of being united in the All About Women collaboration), drinking and vomiting are the preliminaries of the love encounter, and also a hysterical substitute for sex: the girl vomits while the boy is simultaneously seized by the same convulsions when looking at her, and then leans on him saying softly (as after a sexual act) "love". And in fact everything will end up in a hotel room, with a narrative solution that not only opens up to the triggering misunderstanding on the level of the story, but also continues the evocation on a symbolic level: "something" has been consumed, be it love, sex or vomit (in all cases secretion of liquids). This first macro-event of the film characterizes the sense of the whole, and after a more explicitly romantic declination in the next two works, it returns in full in the last two My Mighty Princess and Cyborg She: it might seem simply vulgar scatology, but in reality it exhibits the ability to find truly successful comic solutions typical of burlesque, and aims to make the characters love and entertain the viewer with real tenderness, instead of dragging itself into a paroxysm of gags. Kwak's cinema, even when it "regresses" to the essential infantilism of My Mighty Princess, always manages to maintain itself on a lighter and more subtle regime than the simple succession of situations à la American Pie. It is with Windstruck that Kwak manages to bring this dimension of the relationship between adolescents to a more mature and, in some ways, critical point: the sado-masochistic skirmishes inaugurated in My Sassy Girl (the slap, the "loving pain", which also finds its counterpart in the relationship between mother and son, the icy water, the heels...), get a waste here, also thanks to the commitment of a series of "fetish objects". The handcuffs, which bind the two protagonists not only in the bond of love, but also in that of a "servant-master", or "guard-thief", or in any case "capture-captured" relationship, the gun, which characterizes the female character, but which is used by the male one to "act" his hyper-virilized performance (and to save his partner from humiliation by another man-master). And then, of course, death: the dominion of feeling is mixed here with the dominion over life by the lover over the beloved. Of course, she will despair for the rest of her life, of course death is just a terrible accident, but what other metaphorical form is more successful to describe the complete loss of self of adolescent and youthful love than that of "dying for love", of "dying in the other"? The sado-masochistic relationship refers to the process of seduction between lovers, but is diluted by Kwak (it is always his strength, even when the story undergoes a turn of the screw) with the evidence of slapstick. My Sassy Girl represents a new horizon for Korean cinema, because it represents, in a certain way, the first "hyper-romantic" film, insofar as it deals with and develops all the nuances of the genre, from the comic to the dramatic: you navigate (not by sight) in a multitude of tones, without perceiving the fracture between one register and another. All the female protagonists of his cinema do not inhabit only the register of comedy, nor exclusively that of drama, but neither do they exhaust themselves in a simple melo-dramatic polarity. It is rather a seesaw between sadness and euphoria, which are exchanged and associated with some event, and some narrative junction, following the thread of destiny. Kwak's cinema does not work exclusively on the comedy/(melo)drama opposition articulated on a binary regime, but both are continuously linked to each element of the story. The binary polarities of Kwak's cinema are other: for example, those of the man/woman couple. If the male protagonist is always a symbol of the future and the uncertain, the girl is the symptom of the past and trauma: through this fairly simple equation, Kwak has found something to nurture a story full of creative developments. The aesthetic taste and the naïveté of colors associated with a delicate and simple mise-en-scène, full of youthful and pop winks without slipping into advertising or video clip aesthetics, are constant characteristics of his cinema. Kwak, film after film, enriches his "primordial idea" by drinking from imaginaries and genres that he discovers little by little, following the inspiration of his narrative imagination. His is a pan-Asian cinema, which looks so much to the tradition of comedy and action in Hong Kong (and it is no coincidence that he also wrote screenplays for Andrew Lau, one of the most structured examples of the "poly-genre cinema" of the former colony, capable of moving from drama to romantic comedy with the lightness of a change of clothes), as for the world of new Japanese cinema. But one thing never seems to change in his cinema: his approach to melodrama always automatically leads him to a burlesque vision of things, which leads to the most extreme (genre) consequences, without hesitating to line up a series of hilarious gags for a good hour of film (great storyteller, great teller of "long" stories because they are complex), before veering decisively towards tears. Cyborg She is certainly the redefinition of his cinema, the definitive change of register since the days of My Sassy Girl, which has the traits (explicitly) of a hybridization between Korean tradition and Japanese translation. Jiro is the "strongest" of the descendants of the male protagonist of the first film: he is young and without great prospects for the future. Every year he celebrates his birthday alone, but one day a very strange girl comes to his table. She is not drunk, but comes from the future. The boy and the girl get to know each other, explore each other, learn to interest each other: they run, smile and brush against each other as we have seen Windtruck's lovers do. Like all Kwak lovers, they have to separate, but they meet again a year later, and the girl presents herself as a cyborg who, like the other heroines, must learn to live. This one has a little more problems than the others: it doesn't pay for what it buys (but have the others ever done it?), it drinks perfume, it can't stand alcohol (and this is a constant). She does not know sex (but have the others ever known it?), and declines all her love according to exclusively robotic emotions (protection, help to others). Kwak's cinema, in the figure of the altruistic cyborg (and also a little in love, but unable to be so until the end), has momentarily found another ground of exercise. What will be the next destination?