The Nostalgia of Other Love

You love love right? Of course you do. You’d have to be a psycho not to.

Everyone loves a good love story.

But when I say ‘love story’ what do you think of? Romance.

Of some guy getting the girl, or girl getting the guy, or more recently (and thankfully) guy getting the guy or girl getting the girl.

Hollywood’s love story, which has become our love story, is one of romance, where there is always a big long kiss to tie all those loose strings together and we fade to black.

Think ‘When Harry met Sally’ or Amy Schumers ‘Trainwreck’.

We all love them because they are perfect and hopeful and who doesn’t want to fall in love? If I were a biologist with a PHD I’d say it’s evolutionary, inante to our core… And Hollywood, hell, books, social media, everything, has taught us that’s what love is all about.

But at the very same time we all know there are other forms of love, forms of love we live through everyday. The love we feel for our parents, our friends, even our pets.

For me, the films that have explored these different senses of love have had the most profound impact, these are the love stories I like to watch, because they make me nostalgic as hell. And for some reason I really enjoy that feeling.

Here are two films that gave me the exact same feeling of nostalgia, and why I think they’ve done so.

This first film, thanks to the year I was born in, I didn’t get to see in the cinema. I watched it on the ‘kids tv’ when I was by myself in my parents home, twenty or twenty-two years old in the basement for the holidays.

It was Sofia Coppola’s ‘Lost In Translation’.

A film about a young woman, Charlotte (a very young Scarlett Johannson), recently married to a semi-famous photographer on her honeymoon in Japan, who bumps into fading movie star Bob Harris (Bill Murray) who is filming a whiskey commercial.

Both characters are undergoing a complete life panic (as I was at the time). Charlotte is looking toward the future, unsure of what to do. Bob is looking to the past unsure of what he has done.

As the film progresses the moments they share together are unflinchingly sweet and real. Not only do they bond over their life situation, but their geographical situation: lost in Japanese culture. It’s the script, the plot and the direction but I think most importantly it’s the acting. Scarlett Johannson and Bill Murray connect to each other like real friends would, have, do. Let me get sappy, you can feel the “friend love” they have for each other pulsing through the screen. Because it really does look like they like each other. That’s all. They love each other's company. Talking, joking and experiencing things together like any friends would. And while Coppola toes the line when it comes to romantic love, it is never crossed.

Watching these two people love each other in a way unconnected to romance triggered something in me, in particular the last scene of the film, where the two have to part ways. Charlotte into the crowd and Bob into his taxi to the airport. It took me back to the goodbyes I had to give to great friends leaving to other colleges across the states, tears and all. It’s heartbreak to a T, but this isn’t a breakup is it? It’s seeing someone you love and knowing you won’t see them for a long, long time. To me, that’s still a love story.

I don’t think a film has ever made me feel so damn nostalgic. And of course there’s no way I can give this feeling justice, I’m not a good enough writer, like any true feeling you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Only recently did I realise that the love you have for your friends is one of the first senses of love you come across, so of course it’s going to be powerfully nostalgic when you see it done so realistically in a film.

Watching it I couldn’t help but think of all my friends and how much I wanted to see them again, how much I wanted to relive the moments I’d had with them. All this just bubbling inside me as the credits rolled and I kind of just sat there stuck tumbling around in my blissful past for like half an hour…

And now, only recently, have I seen a film that triggered the same feelings.

This one I got to see in the cinema.

Now I’m twenty eight. I have a girlfriend and we decide to see the film ‘Minari’ by Lee Isaac Chung. A family “drama” that follows a family of South Korean immigrants in America trying to make it as a farm in rural Arkansas in the 1980s. The father, Jacob Yi (played by Steven Yeung), is hell-bent on succeeding. The mother, Monica (Han Ye-ri), doesn’t know what the hell she is doing there. While the kids, David (Alan Kim) and Anne (Noel Kate Cho) are just taking life as it comes (as kids do). Along the way they are joined by Monica’s mother Soon-Ja (Youn Yuh-jung).

There are tensions all throughout this film, particularly between wife and husband, but the greatest one, the one that really got me, is between grandma and grandson.

David is American raised, he has a very cookie-cutter view of what a grandma should be, and when Soon-Ja turns up swigging Mountain Dew and watching wrestling over and over on repeat, he begins to despise her. To the point where he tricks her into drinking his wee.

The sense of love here comes at the end after a devastating event that sees Soon-Ja literally walking away from the family, but David and his sister run after her, to keep her from leaving. Again, acting. Alan Kim won the Critics Choice Award for his performance, and I hope there will be more. It was his acting, the way he related to his grandmother, the way he expressed both hatred and pure love that hit me hard, again.

Their relationship took me back to my relationship with my own grandmother. I never served mine wee, but there is always that sense of other, you see life one way, they see it another. Their rituals are different, your own rituals are your entire world. But the love you have for them is undeniable and incredibly strong. And seeing it I fell back into my past again, to my own grandmother taking me to films, films she had absolutely no intention or desire to view, like Batman Begins, “couldn’t see a thing”, I remember her saying…

For me, the relationship between David and Soon-Ja is a love story.

And as I walked out of the cinema at the end of Minari, quieter than usual, that heavy deep sense of nostalgia made me remember watching Lost in Translation and feeling the exact same way.

When I watch a love story as told by Hollywood, I’ve never felt those feelings, and I’m now realising that maybe it’s because I haven’t experienced romantic love for long enough to develop a sense of nostalgia for it.

I probably need to grow up.

And thinking about it now, it’s actually quite exciting knowing that the older I get, the more I experience will actually change the way films impact me. That a Hollywood love story today, will feel different when I watch it ten years from now.

Apart from that, I may be broadening the definition of a love story too far for some people. But for the longest time all I thought about when I heard love, or love story, was one of romance. And I think that makes you forget about the love you’ve got with everyone else and for a very long period of time those senses of love are the ones that shape us and make us. And it would be very unfortunate to forget about them.

But if I’m gonna wrap this up to relate in any way to the challenge, it’s that recommendations are deeply personal. But if you’re exactly like me, and you’ve loved either Lost In Translation or Minari, you should watch the other. Or, just watch them both again.