There’s a malleability to time that we unyieldingly fail, time after time, to perceive.
In Moonlit Winter, thick snow would pile up across Otaru every year; they line along the houses, obstruct the ebb and flow of the streets, and are shoveled away and cleared out almost immediately — only for them to pile up again the following day.
‘When will the snow end?’ Jun says.
A subdued tale of lost and tucked-away feelings, Moonlit Winter is a brilliant and bruising portrayal of loss; it pushes us to engage with characters Yoon-hee and Jun — past lovers who spend most of the film mourning the love they had given up after a premature separation. When Yoon-hee’s daughter, Sae-bom, discovers that Jun had been trying to contact her, she plans an abrupt trip to the Hokkaido prefecture to reunite the two.
Eventually, Yoon-hee and Jun talk.
There is an undeniable fragility to the way their feelings are conveyed on-screen. Through letters left undelivered, words thrown up the air as they linger to give comfort, and confessions so scathingly personal they’re left on paper never to be read again, every second of the film is tinged with a longing that piles up just like the snow. It was to my surprise that the characters of Moonlit Winter would often sit fine knowing their feelings would forever rest suppressed. Sometimes, they’d come to realize, some moments are better when they pass and become memories.
I don’t know if I’d ever be able to hold that much inside of me. I’ve been here for only as long as eighteen years, and I imagine there is a lot of pain in imagining the unlived lives we’d have had, as a result of our untold stories. It’s an odd kind of pain — a hypothetical, paradoxical pain that juxtaposes our self-portraits.
Everyone in my life right now urges me to let go. I’m trying, but it’s a lot more painful than I’d ever anticipated.
There was so much snow in this film. So much of them. I wonder why it is that this film was the warmest I had felt in a long time.
