In the first year of this century, physics graduate turned director-scriptwriter Kwak Jae-Young scored a big hit at the Korean cinema with My Sassy Girl, a quirky romantic-comedy about an amusingly strong-willed female and the pliant young man who falls for her. It helped put his film career back on track after two box-office failures and eight years without being able to make a movie. Seven years on, the American version of My Sassy Girl went straight to video. This year sees Kwak writing the script for and directing Cyborg She, a quirky Japanese-sci-fi-infused romantic comedy about a young man’s unconventional love for a female cyborg. It is very loosely based on fellow Korean filmmaker Park Chan Wook’s I’m A Cyborg But That’s Okay (2006).
At the start of Cyborg She, it’s November 22, 2008, and university student Jiro Kitamura’s (Kesuke Koide) birthday. Exactly one year before, the affable fellow had become briefly acquainted with a physically attractive – but rather unconventionally acting – young woman (Haruka Hayase) who had claimed that November 22 was also her birthday and given him some memorable experiences before telling him that she was from the future and leaving him. She suddenly reappears as he’s about to have his birthday dinner by himself.
This time around, not only does she help him celebrate his birthday again but also foils the attempts of a crazed individual to set fire to the restaurant they’re in and pump bullets into random patrons. Later, the girl reveals to a stunned Jiro that she’s actually a cyborg – to be precise, Cyberdyne Model 103 – sent back in time by the 65-year-older version of himself to save him from bodily harm in the restaurant incident. In a message delivered via the cyborg, the severely disabled older Jiro also instructs his younger self to let the cyborg remain and learn from living with him. That way, the university student is told, “You can give her a soul,” something the film’s makers set great store by.
Jiro quickly finds that the cyborg may look a lot like a human female but she is obviously a very high-tech machine in quite a few ways. For one thing, she is immensely strong and fast – great attributes for someone who disappears every once in a while to enact good deeds like saving boys from a fire and schoolgirls and their teacher from a man who takes them hostage. On a funnier note, she is also vulnerable to a whole host of social faux pas and unusual behaviours that leave onlookers wondering whether they have drunk too much and are hallucinating.
While some of the often-broad humour does find a receptive audience, during the screening I attended Cyborg She fell flat quite a few times. Even more troublingly, many of the film’s intended moments of pathos and efforts to wring out heartfelt emotion involving the title character end up appearing stupid. A significant part of the problem is that, while Jiro seems to sometimes forget that the super-capable artificial being is not human, it can be hard for the film’s audience to do so. Lastly, the characteristically Korean cinematic twist towards the end of this movie doesn’t help its cause at all – it just makes the overall story more complicated than it really needs to be.

Yvonne Teh