Director: Celine Song
Sigmund Freud posited, in simpler terms, that our learnt experiences, together with unresolved pervasive sexual desires, are the main reasons for actions, inaction and maladies. His mentee, Karl Jung, thought some external events and forces might manifest as meaningful coincidences.
The question is whether we have only one life, just here and now and then we die, or we come here again and again. The film is selling the Korean Buddhist idea of 'In Yun'. We are all somehow connected cosmologically through reincarnation. When we meet people and feel we know them, we may do. There may be some unsettled business that needed to be settled, left from our previous encounters, god knows when. This could be our umpteenth trans-birth meet. Or it could be a ruse to get into each other's pants. The Mahabharata is full of these stories of paying back the evil deeds of past lives. King Shantanu's first wife, the mighty Ganga, drowned seven of her newborns. The eight escaped. Her justification was that her eight children were the eight elements that acquired a curse from a sage for coveting a cow in their previous lives. Like that, every action and reaction in this epic has its roots in the past.
With the help of social media, they reconnected twelve years later. Life took its course; Nora got married, Hae Sung went to study in China, got into a relationship and failed. Another twelve years later, Hae Sung announced his arrival in the USA. This created an awkward situation between the three in the party of two. Nora's white husband worries she might return to her first love. Nora fears rekindling the old relationship, and Hae Sung is probably a forlorn romantic.
As it turns out, in the film, a thirty-something Korean girl whose family had migrated to North America has a chance to meet her childhood friend. The last time they met, they were twelve-year-old classmates who shared something of a puppy love. After migrating to Canada, the girl, No Young, changed her name to Nora and started life anew in her newfound home. The boy, Hae Sung, stayed and progressed in his own way. Out of sight, but not really out of mind. The lost touch.
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| 3 for the party of 2? |
The story is about how they resolve an issue that is a non-issue. After being tied down in a relationship, it is human nature to wonder how life would be if we had taken a different path. That is when we should slap ourselves awake, douse water on our faces and remind ourselves that whichever path we take, the journey and the outcome are invariably the same. The paths may vary, but both would be filled with ups, downs, joy, heartbreaks, achievements and letdowns. Just eat what we have, enjoy the flavour served and stop wondering what another flavour would have tasted. The end result, we know.
