Jang Sun-Woo (1994): ‘I tried to deal with higher values in my last film Hwa-om-kyung. This time I’ve gone to the other extreme.’To You, From Me is a scabrous social satire, an all-out assault on political correctness and a challenge to every kind of taboo. The central characters are a failed novelist (a convicted plagiarist) who churns out sexist porn, a bright working-class woman with a highly original approach to life and sex and a sexually dysfunctional bank-clerk with an over-active fantasy life. The story of their tangled relationships is the perfect vehicle for Jang’s excoriation of ‘trash culture’. The film’s twin poles are creativity and impotence, celebrity and insignificance, activism and hypocrisy, dominance and submission, live action and animation, physical sex and mental violence. No recent film anywhere in the world has had its finger further up the bum of the 1990s. Tony Rayns
