Love and novelty

What do we fall in love with? Personality? A face? A body? Can we isolate these parts of us from each other? And what is it that we consider self? ‘I cannot recognize the person I fell in love with. She changed so much’. Does this make any sense? May our personalities change so much that we become ‘other’ person? And what if we remain the same person but physically change so much others do not recognize us? Are we the same individual or not?

How does the process of growing tired of someone work? We constantly get tired of objects and covet new ones. Are individuals like objects? But, isn´t it that we may fall in love with each other because we are not objects? If we are not objects, how can we get tired of seeing the same face every morning, by our side, when we wake up? Where do we set up the tipping point, by which the feeling of happiness aroused by the presence of the loved one turns into fatigue? And, beyond this point, are we really able to go back in time, towards the moment it all started? ‘I love you more each day’. Can this really go on forever? Isn´t the contrary more likely, though?

What would we be willing to do to make our loved one to keep those feelings alive, as if in the very beginning? Up to which point could we change so he / she experienced it as a fresh start, a whole new story but with the same characters? Could we be willing to change phisically? Is this too much? Actually, we see this around us on a daily basis, and for the same reasons (many people voluntarily undergo painful physical transformations in an attempt to retain his / her love).

Why couldn´t desire for the same body stay with us forever? ‘I´ll love you forever’, we say. Why not ‘I´ll desire you forever’?

Find these captivating and disturbing questions in the astounding South Korean movie Shi-Gan (Time), directed by Kim Ki-Duk in 2006.

Photo: Hyeon-a Seong in Shi-Gan © Flixter.com