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Watching this sort of media with an SO has always felt awkward to me throughout the years. So far I’ve successfully avoided it with mine due to her particular preferences in media consumption, but I have to wonder if either of you pattern-matched the on-screen narrative to your own lives, even in hypotheticals? Do you feel more like Arthur, or Hae Sung?
I'm white and a native English speaker and my girlfriend is Asian, so on paper I should be identifying with Arthur. But I didn't really find myself "identifying" with any of the characters on-screen. My immediate thought after watching the movie was that Nora's dilemma could never happen to me, as there's no Hae Sung (an old flame, the "one who got away" with whom I have an undeniable and unshakeable romantic bond) waiting to turn up on my doorstep. For the same reason, I could never find myself in Hae Sung's shoes: there may be women in my past who occasionally pop into my head and I wonder how they're doing and what might have been, but I'm very confident that the feeling isn't mutual. The very reason Hae Sung can't stop thinking about Nora is that he knows she's just as attached to him as he is to her, which eats him up inside.
There's one line of dialogue that, depending how you interpret it, I quite related to. Nora and Arthur are lying in bed talking about their situation. Nora assures Arthur that she loves him, and Arthur says something like "I know you do. I just have a hard time believing it sometimes." There's two ways you can read this line: does Arthur mean that he has a hard time believing that Nora specifically loves him (perhaps because there's still such a huge part of her that loves Hae Sung)? Or does Arthur mean that he has such poor self-esteem that he has a hard time believing that anyone loves him? If the latter, big mood.
Great introspection, much appreciated, but also importantly, what might/did your girlfriend feel? That would be my curiosity were I in your shoes.
She was tearing up in the cinema and felt sad for a few days afterwards (as did I). She was so touched at how supportive Arthur was being in light of the fact that, from his perspective, it looked very much like his wife was reconnecting with an old boyfriend and was feeling torn about which man she wanted to be with. I didn't get the impression that she was "identifying" with Nora, and I'm quite confident that there's no Hae Sung waiting in the wings for her. She just told me that she thought the film's depiction of the immigrant experience was very true to life, specifically in how Nora expresses herself vastly differently in Korean than she does in English (not just the manner of speaking, tone of voice, vocal pitch etc.; but also the content of what she says).
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