halfcactus

Past Lives (2023)
An artsy romantic drama movie that follows the relationship between childhood sweethearts across time and distance: Nayoung is the ambitious and self-assured achiever who has aspirations of becoming a writer and whose family immigrates to Canada, and Haesung is the more conventionally intelligent boy she left behind.

I wasn't too interested in their relationship so I got pretty restless in the first half, though I was very interested in the glimmers of Nayoung's (now known as Nora) life that we saw—her single-mindedness focus, her struggles to type in hangeul when she first reconnects with Haesung, the fact that her mother was the only other person she could speak Korean with. At the very least, I liked that it had a sense of place and a sense of time, and that the central PoV is Nayoung's, who has her own relationship with the language and the country that no longer mean home.

Everything came together really well for me in the last act, where the emotions get much more complex and you get a better sense of the power of narratives——and while everyone else is caught up trying to find themselves in the story, Nora is simply living her own.

Mostly what I liked about it is, as always, its relationship with language and diasporic identity! Particularly in the scene where Nayoung talks about how Haesung makes her feel simultaneously more and less Korean, and the scene where you get the outsider's PoV of Nayoung speaking Korean (she switches between English and Korean throughout the movie, but usually it's a 1:1 conversation with no one else listening in). All the languages I speak are extremely personal to me and reflect different parts of me, so it was really nice to see that in the movie, even when the character herself does not see it that way.

All in all, I enjoyed this movie more than I thought I would!



Skip and Loafer
High school anime about Mitsumi, a very plain small-town girl from a neglected part of Ishikawa Prefecture who moves to Tokyo to pursue her dream of becoming a government official. The manga was on my Kindle recommendations, and it turned out to be a really good algorithm-based recommendation. I ended up liking the anime enough to maybeeee continue on with the manga. ♥

The first two eps, which are about the first two days of school, gave me enough secondhand anxiety that I was watching on high speed, but they settle down into a really cozy rhythm. As far as high school animes go, there's nothing particularly new about this, but it's funny and moving in all the right places, and though low-key, it still brims with ~*seishun*~.

Its strength is definitely in the character writing, where even though the girls are archetypes, they feel very much like individual people with different kinds of anxiety , different ways of coping, and different relationships with each other. And it's extremely sweet when they reach out and make the leap to become friends, even when they're varying levels of social and growing at different rates. The loving and thoughtful characterization extends to Nao-chan, Mitsumi's aunt and guardian who has her own complex thoughts and feelings as a caring adult, a protective aunt, and a trans woman living in Tokyo.

The male lead is an easygoing and emotionally intelligent teenager whose angst manifests in his bemusement with the concept of passion and ambition. There's some dramatic backstory in his life that I felt highly skeptical about, but it deescalates quickly and is resolved satisfyingly at the end of the season (though it left me curious about his family dynamic and how much of that was exacerbated by his own thoughts).

CW: One of the characters is controlling her weight/diet because she was bullied in the past. It's not a central part of her character, but it is part of her backstory.