In a story that understands not all relationships are linear, two childhood best friends embark on vastly different life journeys, but keep colliding with each other along the way. Toying with ideas of art and authenticity, the film makes us question our heroines intertwined lives right up until the very end.
MOVIE REVIEW
Soulmate is a lot about contrasts. Hazy, fantasy-like scenes are braided together with darkly realistic moments. Stories and lies are often mistaken for true life experiences. And opposite emotions – friendship and rivalry, closeness and distance, even love and hate – are shown to be inexplicably linked when it comes to our most enduring relationships. As one character points out, shadows exist because of the sunlight.
Released theatrically in March of this year and now available for streaming, the film follows two young friends as they make their way to adulthood and navigate the life beyond. It’s a subtle tale that marks its life transitions with fractures so tiny they remain almost imperceptible to the audience — and to the main characters. By the time the damage is done, they (and we) are asking, “How did we end up like this?”
Our protagonists, AHN MI-SO (Kim Da-mi) and GO HA-EUN (Jeon So-ni), meet as pre-teens (played beautifully by Kim Soo-hyung and Ryu Jian as their respective younger selves) when Mi-so arrives to a Jeju classroom after transferring from Seoul. Right from day one, the girls are inseparable – complimenting opposite aspects of each other and picking up the slack where the other might falter.
The two are so close that when Mi-so’s mother decides to up and leave town again, Mi-so stays in Jeju with Ha-eun, rather than have her life uprooted continually. And from the beginning, this seemingly slight, almost-hidden difference has a big impact on the ways their lives play out. While outwardly they grow up like sisters, the reality is that they’re not. Mi-so has been abandoned while Ha-eun has her parents’ love. This isn’t an explanation for their behavior, but rather, it’s one of the small crevices that will deceptively add to the major crack between them.
Years flash forward and we see them as high school seniors, with Mi-so outspoken and defiant and Ha-eun quieter but eager to follow Mi-so’s trouble-ready lead. Both girls are artists and Mi-so’s dream is to travel the world and paint – living hard and burning out early like Janis Joplin. Ha-eun, though, is afraid to fly, and so she declines when Mi-so gives her the hypothetical offer of traveling the world together someday. Ha-eun is so timid that even though she’s great at drawing, she plans to follow her father’s wishes and become a teacher instead.
As we start to see the tracks laid for how their paths might diverge, the biggest breach of them all appears in the form of a boy: HAM JIN-WOO (Byun Woo-seok). He’s Ha-eun’s crush – and will be a life-long source of problems for the two best friends.
At the outset, there are signs of trouble. Jin-woo isn’t initially aware of Ha-eun’s existence and Mi-so (not subtly) pushes him into dating her. But it’s clear even in their first conversation – which is about Ha-eun – that Jin-woo is attracted to Mi-so. Once he and Ha-eun are firmly in a relationship, the duo becomes a trio, spending all their free time together and enjoying their final summer of youth. It isn’t long before all those playful hours culminate in a forbidden kiss that shakes Mi-so badly enough to send her fleeing to Seoul to embark on the next phase of her life.
From here, the split in the friends’ lives becomes blatant but the real reasons for it aren’t clarified until the end – when both women have had time to contend with their own lives. We see Mi-so living a bohemian lifestyle, working odd jobs and taking painting classes, until she’s ditched by whatever guy she’s taken up with and told by her art teacher that her paintings are mediocre. Yet, for five years, she writes letters back to Ha-eun, fabricating a successful life and lying about all the world travel she’s doing.
Back in Jeju, Ha-eun stays the course on her teaching career and continues her relationship with Jin-woo. All the while, she receives letters and postcards from Mi-so, and is glassy-eyed over the life Mi-so is living without her. One day, out of the blue, Mi-so arrives in Jeju and the two old friends hug and gulp back their tears without saying a word.
Their happiness to see each other is short-lived, however, when Ha-eun witnesses the way Mi-so lives – the things she does for money – and becomes judgmental. The tension rises until they’re both speaking out loud the feelings they’ve been holding secret for all these years. Jealousy, rivalry, pity, contempt – before they’ve even started dinner, Ha-eun is up from the table and leaving the restaurant and it’s clear the rift is too big to repair.
Time pushes forward again and we see Mi-so try to make a stable life for herself only to be knocked into chaos time after time. When she’s dealt a horrible blow, Jin-woo is the one to pick her up – even though he’s engaged to Ha-eun. This last betrayal leads to the movie’s climax – a fight which takes place in Jin-woo’s small, cramped apartment bathroom – where a drunk Mi-so is sobered up by the cold, hard reality of what’s happened to her friendship with Ha-eun.
The scene is quite brilliant in its nuance and also serves as a turning point for the characters as well as the audience. While Mi-so has had the harder life, Ha-eun has been the more sympathetic character. At this point, Ha-eun’s true colors come out when it’s clear she’s known Mi-so’s core weakness all along. Afterward, as they pick up the shattered pieces of their lives, they both change tracks, seemingly gaining from each other what they lack in themselves, just like they did as children.
Soulmate is gripping in its first half to three-quarters, but lags in the final stretch where it moves away from plausibility and toward melodrama to close out the story. Still, its questioning of what it means to be a soulmate is solid, with two women whose lives touch and disperse from each other continually in a tiding journey about friendship, family, love – and all the shadow sides that make the good parts shine brighter.
We’re told in the opening sequence that Ha-eun’s drawing style is called “hyper-realism” – a method by which the penciled portrait looks like a photo. With cinematography that moves from lovely washed-out colors to grainy shots that conjure the sticky summer heat – as well as a slight, resonant narrative – the movie lands in hyper-realistic territory itself. Following its painterly eye, we come to see the contrasts that make our heroines’ lives so painful and yet so beautiful.