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A FORCE TO BE RECKON WITH
Equal parts sass and charm, Jeon Ji Hyun, star of 'Windstruck', is the face of South Korean cinema
BY BRYAN WALSH | SEOUL
Monday, May. 31, 2004
Jeon Ji Hyun has earned the adoration of Asian audiences by acting tough. In 2001's blockbuster romantic comedy 'My Sassy Girl', she outdrank and
verbally abused her meek onscreen boyfriend, all (more or less) in the name of love. In person, you don't get many of the withering glares, emasculating
insults—and certainly not the Tyson-like uppercut—that Jeon displayed on screen. Instead, you meet someone who politely waits for you to order lunch.
In real life, it turns out, Jeon isn't that sassy.
But the screen persona has made the 22-year-old poster girl of South Korean cinema's commercial renaissance a star. Despite having made just five films,
Jeon has become famous throughout much of Asia, smiling on magazine and TV ads from Sapporo to Singapore. Her TV campaign for 'Olympus' digital
cameras helped hike the company's brand recognition by more than 15%, according to advertising company 'LG Ad'. 'My Sassy Girl' was seen by more
than 5 million people in South Korea and sat on top of the box office for two weeks in Hong Kong, where local films and Hollywood exclusively rule.
Now comes her new movie Windstruck, which reunites her with Sassy writer and director Kwak Jae Young, and which is set to open on June
3 simultaneously in South Korea, China and Hong Kong—a first for a South Korean film. "Jeon is just a phenomenon," says Bill Kong, the Hong Kong film
mogul who backed 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' and 'Hero', and who is co-producing 'Windstruck'.
Jeon became Asia's favorite South Korean actress by shattering stereotypes. "Korean women have been portrayed generally as submissive, but that's s
imply not true," she says. Her opening scene in Sassy buries that possibility: she wobbled drunk onto a subway train, vomited on a stranger's toupee and
passed out in the arms of a scandalized young man (Cha Tae Hyun). Jeon's bossy character quickly took control of her timid boyfriend's life. Through it all,
Jeon was in charge, and audiences loved it. Wild, free and utterly herself, Jeon became a model for an assertive generation of young Asian women.
"People have this notion that men have to be macho and women have to be pretty and act pretty," says Jang Hyuk, Jeon's friend and co-star in 'Windstruck'.
"But if you look at Jeon's character in the film [Sassy], she presents an honest, flawed character beautifully."
Great talent often leads to typecasting, however, and in the aftermath of Sassy, Jeon was inundated with scripts that called for a vivacious, semiviolent heroine
with a slight drinking problem. Instead, Jeon signed on for 'The Uninvited', a classic South Korean horror film that dealt with infanticide, suicide, parricide and
severe wedding anxiety. The depressing film had a lukewarm performance at the box office, but the role proved she had range.
When Jeon decided she was ready to return to comedy, so was Kwak. He'd written the script for 'Windstruck', a tale of a romance between a goofy
high-school teacher and a sassy female police officer, with Jeon in mind. The script—and Jeon's likely involvement—caught the attention of Kong, who
was looking for a way into South Korea's ballooning film industry, which now captures more than 50% of the country's box office. Kong thought that a
broad South Korean comedy like 'Windstruck', with an international star like Jeon, had a chance to be a pan-Asian success. "Korea is not like Japan,"
separate from the rest of the region, he says. "Its culture is closer to China, closer to the rest of Asia."
'Windstruck' wants to be a more ambitious film than Sassy, so Kwak turns off the fun too soon and retreats to typically South Korean melodrama. Yet the
movie manages to rise above its occasional sappiness, thanks mostly to the charm of its two young stars. Jeon pulls off her signature trick: veering between
violence and vulnerability and back again, without missing a beat. After lunch, she leaves for a photo shoot, for which the concept—apparently—is that she is
"the world's favorite girlfriend." Not yet. But give her time.
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