MOVIE DIARY 2023: IT'S TRUE THAT IF YOU LEAVE YOU LOSE THINGS, BUT YOU ALSO GAIN THINGS TOO.
Tessa Strain joins us again at MOVIE DIARY 2023 with her record-breaking 7th guest appearance! We watched Reds (1981) together last week, and I just knew I had to get Tessa back on MOVIE DIARY 2023 with her take on Warren Beatty’s leftist love triangle.
Reds (1981) - dir. Warren Beatty
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: TESSA STRAIN
If there’s any great evidence that I live in a bubble, it’s this: it feels like every woman I know with a Criterion Channel subscription has been talking about Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981) over the last three weeks, and more specifically, debating the love triangle at the center of Reds with a zeal and rigor we usually reserve for, say, the political issues also at the center of Reds. Appropriately, Reds is also largely set within this kind of bubble (a self-selecting group of leftists, artists, and general pains in the ass) as they navigate the tensions between their political and romantic commitments. Beatty’s particular genius in telling the story of journalist-activists John Reed and Louise Bryant is in maintaining skepticism that, as Humphrey Bogart memorably says at the end of Casablanca, “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” In Reds, even amid the context of a global collective struggle, the tension among the often-warring demands of idealism, desire, and self-fulfillment is omnipresent and consequential. How these people choose to live and love is intrinsic to the world they record and the world they fight to build.
When we meet Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton), she is a big fish in a small pond, making a splash in Portland, Oregon for her progressive journalism and modeling in scandalous (read: extremely tasteful) nude art photographs while maintaining an otherwise conventional marriage to a local dentist. The arrival of the charismatic, adventurous, and idealistic John Reed (Beatty) on the scene sets something afire within her: within days of his arrival she propositions him, piles her articles on his lap, and follows him to New York for a life of bohemianism and revolutionary politics. Reed is Bryant’s ticket out of her old life and into a new one, but he also takes her at her word when she claims her independence, to the point that she finds herself struggling for a foothold among her new peers. Reed got her into the room, but as he makes it clear, the rest is up to her.
For those of you not in my particular bubble, one clip from Reds in particular has found its way into dozens of DMs and group chats: Jack Nicholson as Eugene O’Neill making his big pitch to Bryant, at that point in an open relationship with her husband Reed but entertaining an affair with O’Neill. Beatty said he cast Nicholson because he was the only man he could think of who could steal a woman from him, and here’s where we see him at full power. Bryant, quivering with anger (and, come on, arousal) and on the verge of tears, defends her relationship with Reed, saying, “He has the freedom to do the things that he wants to, and so do I. And I think that anyone who is afraid of that kind of freedom is only afraid of his own emptiness.” O’Neill responds, smoldering, “If you were mine I wouldn’t share you with anybody or anything. It’d be just you and me, and we’d be at the center of it all. And it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.”
Whether it is more like love than not is open for debate, but what’s clear is that the dueling offers on the table are to either be at the center of the universe, or to be the center of the universe. Bryant and Reed are two people facing the same direction; Bryant and O’Neill are two people facing each other. In Reed she has a partner who opens her up to a broader world, who has faith in her intellect and respect for her freedom, but who will never protect her, never hold her hand, and will often neglect her in service of his own ambition and their shared ideals. In O’Neill she has something else: his undivided attention, which is (let’s face it) insanely sexy but also smothering. Can you blame a woman for doing an end run around the whole decision and simply moving to Paris by herself?
When Bryant and Reed reconnect, it’s because he invites her to Moscow to cover the incipient Russian Revolution with him, and when she accepts it’s as his working partner, and not his wife or lover. And yet, for the first time since the inception of their relationship, we see how their shared political fervor and passion for their work can transmute into romantic and sexual intimacy between them instead of inhibiting it. But this momentum is hard to sustain stateside, and as Reed gets more deeply embroiled in internecine conflicts among American Communists, Bryant loses patience with him, politically and romantically. If Reed wants to take his one kidney to Moscow just to stick it to Paul Sorvino, he’s going to have to do it on his own—it’s a disastrous idea, and he follows through on it.
When word gets back to Bryant that Reed is trapped in Moscow (and eventually Finnish prison) and unable to leave, she realizes that their separation is untenable and decides to make the arduous journey to reach him. We see O’Neill once more, not persuading Bryant to stay or offering to help her get to Reed, but instead offering to go in her place. It’s an offer she can’t possibly accept, but it’s the first time we see that O’Neill’s love for Bryant has expanded beyond the two of them to something bigger. In a similar reversal, when Bryant finally makes it to Reed and the two of them find each other, filthy, exhausted, and near-broken, in a train station, we see for the first time Reed’s real need for Bryant, beyond the terms of egalitarianism. When he whispers “Please don’t leave me” as they embrace, it’s a revelation, albeit one that almost comes too late.
Like the Witnesses (as Beatty calls them) in the film, the real-life compatriots whose commentary and gossip about Bryant and Reed colors and shapes Reds, my friends and I have spent the last few weeks discussing and debating these people, mapping their tensions and passions onto our own, wondering what decisions we’d make in their place. What makes Reds so timeless is the way the questions of who and how to love, where and when to prioritize your vocation, and how to balance desire against idealism feel as unanswerable and urgent as they ever did. All Reds can offer us is the promise that, politically and romantically, the struggles we face will be ongoing and full of reversals, but that it is ennobling to risk something of yourself and face these struggles with courage.
———
Tessa Strain is a writer (and actor????) living in Geoff’s apartment. Her work has appeared in Bright Wall/Dark Room and The Comics Journal. She is @tessastrain on Twitter, where she does a pretty good job, and on Instragram, where she does a bad one.
Past Lives (2023) - dir. Celine Song
Nora (Greta Lee) once lived in Korea where she had a best friend/mutual crush in Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). Nora and her family immigrate to Canada, leaving Hae Sung and their lives in Korea behind. Twelve years pass and Nora’s moved to New York. She and Hae Sung find each other and get back in touch on the internet, and they spend late nights and early mornings on Skype just catching up and talking, and maybe falling in love. Perhaps realizing she’s getting too deep in her feelings over a guy from her past who lives on the other side of the world, Nora tells Hae Sung that she needs to stop talking to him so that she can focus on her career in the present without being hung up on the past. Another twelve years pass, and Nora’s now married to Arthur (John Magaro), who she met at a writers’ retreat. Hae Sung and his girlfriend in Korea have just broken up, and Hae Sung has scheduled a vacation for himself in New York, where he’s hoping to finally meet up and reconnect with Nora again after twenty four years.
I really loved this one, I thought it was just beautiful. Before watching it, I thought it was going to be one of those romance movies where no one gets what they want (one of my favorite types of movies), but it’s not exactly that, and I loved that about it. I think it’s less about something like heartbreak and disappointment, and more about a feeling of longing or yearning and the combination of excitement and pain that comes out of a true sense of nostalgia. By the end of the movie, no one ends up exactly heartbroken, but there’s still a kind of deep feeling of loss for what once was. I think it’s a subtle distinction that each of the actors perform so well, and it’s so moving to be wrapped up in these people’s lives as they try to work out these complex feelings.
I don’t know that Hae Sung finally goes to New York specifically to rekindle a relationship with Nora, but he definitely wants to see her again, and I think if there was a chance to start up a relationship with Nora, that’d be something he’d have to figure out when it comes. I think Hae Sung just genuinely wants to see his friend again, after both of the last times when they said goodbye to each other were so abrupt. I think Hae Sung, more than anything, goes on his trip to New York to seek some sense of closure or an answer to these conflicting feelings that he has over his relationship with Nora. If Hae Sung really were trying to “win back” Nora, I think he would have wanted to rethink wearing a backpack while going to meet his crush after twenty four years of not seeing each other.
Similarly, I believe Arthur when he says that he’s not threatened by Hae Sung’s sudden appearance, and I think he is genuine when he urges Nora to hang out and spend more time with Hae Sung while he’s in town. He’s not just being a good sport! Arthur really loves Nora, and he knows Nora enough to know that she loves him too and she wouldn’t just suddenly throw out the life that she’s worked so hard to build. Arthur has a moment where he talks about how the whole situation sounds like the premise of a rom-com, and if it were a rom-com, he’d be the clueless guy standing in the way of true romance, but this isn’t a rom-com love triangle, and this isn’t a romance in that sense. Nora and Arthur’s story might not be as “romantic” as Nora and Hae Sung’s might be, but the love between Nora and Arthur is real and now. Hae Sung and Nora’s love is something from the past that was never really given the chance to develop, because of circumstances that led to Nora and Arthur being together. At the end of the day, Arthur knows that Nora is here with him because this is exactly where she wants to be.
There’s this really moving part of the movie where Arthur and Nora are in bed talking about this whole situation, and Arthur tells Nora that he only really hears her speaking Korean these days when she’s talking in her sleep. He says that part of the reason that he’s trying to learn Korean is because it seems like there’s this whole world inside her that he can’t yet understand, but he wants to because he loves her so much. He says that she makes his life so much bigger than he could ever think, and he just wishes that he could make her feel the same way. It’s a very affecting moment, and I think it’s one that really speaks to how Nora has had a foot in two worlds, and two different versions of herself. That Arthur is able to recognize this, accept this, and want so deeply to understand it and be part of it is so touching and shows his love for her.
Obviously Nora is at the center of this, and Greta Lee does such a wonderful job of showing her decades-spanning internal conflict. Nora is a person who only wants to focus on her present, but that’s impossible. We’re humans. Our past informs our present, and Nora knows this. At the center of the movie is the Korean idea of In-Yun, a connection between two people that brings them together even from past lives. The more meaningful their connection in the present, the more layers of In-Yun have developed between the two over their past lives. For Nora, her past life isn’t just something that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago, it’s also the life she lived twenty four years ago in Korea. I think she does love Hae Sung, and while that love has changed into something different over spending twenty four years apart, the feeling and emotional memories of romantic love still linger. Hae Sung himself is a vestige of her past life in Korea, and while Nora isn’t trying to forget or deny her past life, she wants to be firmly planted in her present life in New York with Arthur. She says to herself, to Arthur, and later to Hae Sung, that where she is now is where she’s meant to be and there’s nothing that will take her away from where she’s meant to be.
It’s very sweet to see Nora and Hae Sung finally getting to be together and hanging out in New York, but there’s a kind of undercurrent of melancholy to it. As they wander around Central Park, the carousel at DUMBO, and take tourist pictures on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, you can see that they’re both enjoying the time with each other, but you recognize a sense of heartache that the two are trying to mask because they know that this can’t last. The two of them are no longer the same kids they were in Korea, they’re both living completely different lives in other parts of the world.
Before his last night in town, Hae Sung and Nora finally have a conversation that gives them both a level of closure and understanding that I think is so beautiful. Hae Sung loves Nora because of who she is, but who she is is someone who’s left and can’t be with him. But if she had stayed behind, she wouldn’t be the person he loves. The movie ends with Nora and Hae Sung saying goodbye, taking small comfort in wondering whether In-Yun will bring them together in their next lives. As Hae Sung leaves to the left of the screen to return to the past in Korea, the camera follows Nora as she walks to the right, into her present and future where Arthur is waiting for her. There hasn’t been an actual breakup in the romantic sense, but Nora still feels the pain of loss coming from saying goodbye to Hae Sung, and finally closing the door on her past life.
The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord
I really liked this Los Angeles Times interview with Flea! I love Flea!
I have a new album coming out TOMORROW with my synthesizer project, AISUS. It’s my first album and I’ve been working on it all year, so I hope you’ll check it out! Follow me on my Bandcamp for updates! You can also listen to all my previous three EPs on there too!
I feel like there was some other stuff I wanted to plug here, but I’ve totally forgotten what it was! If you join us at the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord you can suggest links to me and plug your own stuff there for the rest of the MOVIE DIARY 2023 community to enjoy.