Gone With The Light (2019)

What's love got to do with it?

Gone with the Light was a thoughtful meditation on what romantic love is and the extent to which we need it in our lives. What happens when an inexplicable beam of light judges your relationship and love as inadequate? Do you examine yourself and your life? Or do you make excuses and justifications? Do you accept that you must live without love?

One spring morning a beam of light causes a fraction of the people from the planet to disappear. The story focuses on three people left behind, Wu Wen Xue, a teacher who has been married for nearly 20 years; Lin Nan, an officer worker in the process of divorcing her philandering husband; and Kuai Zi, a small-time hoodlum who says he doesn't believe in love but is desperately searching for his partner in crime. Though not connected their paths do inadvertently cross at times.

"It's only us who can define our love." Wu is the emotional heart of the film as he wrestles with his stale marriage and the discrimination he faces at work for being morally suspicious as one left behind. Wu becomes desperate to prove he and his wife love each other even sinking to buying photoshopped pictures and a fake train ticket showing she was out of town during the beam which explains why they weren't taken together. Initially, he tries to save face during an increasingly unstable social order but soon he is forced to confront the reality that his marriage wasn't working and was built on convenient lies, both his and hers. Huang Bo gave a lovely nuanced performance that strengthened the emotional depth of the film.

"You take in my trash and treat it as treasure." Li Nan is confronted by her husband's mistress when he disappears. The two women begin their odyssey of discovering who he truly loved and disappeared with. Along the way they discover more about themselves and their feelings for the man they shared. They also uncovered parts of his life hitherto unknown, finding neither had truly understood him.

"We're all the same. We don't have love." Kaui Zi was the least developed character, someone who eschewed loved but whose desperation in finding his partner hinted more than a little at a same sex love, at least on his part. Through him we see another man who killed his wife for putting green onions in his stir-fry, an obvious demonstration that she hadn't loved him which is why they didn't disappear.

"It's already proved there's no love." A young woman whose parents refused to let her marry the guy she was in love with watched them disappear during a heated argument. The father had numerous mistresses and the mother was an inveterate gambler and neither ever showed any love toward the other. What is true love?

The light beam was never explained, which is okay, because the story was about the human response not the initial supernatural action. As one character stated, "Love is sci-fi enough." No one truly knew why the people disappeared or if it was even a good thing, but the ones left behind felt envious and ashamed, often sinking into despair. Even when the government eventually refuted the true love entanglement cause, people still felt as if their relationships and their lives had been judged as loveless. Many of the people taken were in affairs or unhealthy relationships, yet people always want what they don't have. For the people who took advantage of the gift of being rejected it gave them the chance to evaluate themselves and their relationships.

Love can be exciting, messy, complicated, pedestrian, and gently satisfying. Other times it is elusive as smoke. People find and cultivate what gives them meaning. The light beam caused those who were left behind to examine what it is they wanted, what might be missing from their relationships, and what responsibility they owned in that. Gone With the Light was a quiet reflection on love and relationships anchored by strong performances. My favorite scene was the last one. It is often during the routine and mundane where we find love, comfort, and even forgiveness. What is true love? Something you have to define for yourself. This film will not be for everyone, but if this is your type of film, you might find a hidden gem.

"The light won't give us an answer. It's a test, a projection of oneself to let us truly face ourselves and then move on in our lives."

7/14/23

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