Saudade
The tragic beauty of "right person, wrong time" narratives
This post contains major spoilers for the movies La La Land, Past Lives, Chungking Express, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Casablanca, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Her, the Before trilogy, and In the Mood for Love. You have been warned.
The end of the year can be a melancholic time. Looking back on your dreams as one year comes to a close often surfaces reminders of plans unfulfilled, goals unmet, or the good things that came to an end.
Each January, I publish a write up of my year in review.1 These posts started as a way to highlight the books and movies I enjoyed over the past 12 months while fishing for recommendations from readers for future enjoyment, but have gradually morphed into a solipsistic discussion of my progress toward last year's resolutions. I appreciate this public journaling exercise for giving me a way to hold myself accountable and for sparking engaging conversations with readers.
As I began prepping my 2024 reflection, I noticed a specific vibe present in many of the movies I enjoyed this year. Despite significant variations in the settings, production style, and language spoken in movies new to me in 2024 such as Portrait of a Lady on Fire, In the Mood for Love, and Before Sunset, I found a common thread connecting these and other movie standouts together: They all tell stories constructed around the concept of saudade.
Saudade is a Portuguese word without a direct equivalent in English. I love untranslatable words, for they often capture sentiments we all understand — like the German schadenfreude, which is pleasure derived from another’s misfortune, or the Japanese tsundoku, which is the act of acquiring books without reading them — but have never managed to define in the English lexicon.
Like any word without a clear English counterpart, the definition of saudade varies slightly depending on which source you consult, but I am particularly fond of the 1912 definition from the Oxford English Dictionary:
[Saudade is] a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future
A desire that is simultaneously vague and constant is haunting. Instead of having a word or name on the tip of your tongue, to experience saudade is to have a longing looming in the back of your mind, to be reminded ceaselessly of a happy circumstance that collapsed and is never coming back, typically through no fault of your own.
Saudade is the perfect term for the sensation binding together otherwise unrelated movies that I have so enjoyed, such as Past Lives and Casablanca. It hardly matters if the relationship depicted is gay or straight or even between two humans, for a well-made film featuring saudade will rip your heart out all the same.
I first noticed something was calling me to this type of story when I revisited La La Land early in 2024. I rarely seek out musicals, so the fact that I was willingly re-watching La La Land signaled to me that there was something more than the catchy showtunes giving the movie its emotional resonance.
When I attempted to summarize my surprisingly positive reaction to a rewatch of La La Land, I initially referred to the movie’s framing of the unfulfilled romance between Mia and Sebastian as the “what could have been” angle. My less eloquent substitute for the concept I now know as saudade can also be phrased as “right person, wrong time.” Yet no matter what you call it, this specific subgenre of romantic drama is the most powerful framing device in my eyes because it highlights our ultimate lack of control, and how even requited love can fail.
If we use Mia and Seb as our example of how saudade plays out, the always-present possibility for a relationship to fall apart for reasons out of anyone’s control is made obvious. Just before the whirlwind climax of La La Land, Seb drives all the way to Nevada to convince Mia not to give up on her dreams of making it as an actress. When the movie flashes forward in time to reveal the two succeeded in their professional goals but did not ultimately end up together, we see how Seb in turn relied on Mia’s emotional support to recommit to his jazz club, which is now booming.
The emotional knife twist comes when Seb and Mia lock eyes — Mia while standing in the back of the club with her husband, Seb while playing the piano for an enthralled audience — and the movie’s audience is taken on a voyeuristic eight-minute ride as the pair imagine what their lives would have been like if they (mainly Seb) had put their love ahead of their artistic goals. We learn that in this hypothetical, Mia still becomes a successful actress, while Seb sticks by her side and takes piano roles following her throughout her career. He may not own his own jazz club, but by any reasonable definition of success for a musician, he has achieved it.
Of course, the fantasy ends when the film returns to reality, one where Seb is seemingly more successful professionally but far less so romantically. It is impossible to fault Seb or Mia for the choices they made, as their love failed due to the largely mutual understanding that the demands of their separate careers meant it was impossible for either person to behave differently while still reaching the same levels of success. This no-fault romantic failure is saudade.
La La Land could not be more different stylistically from Wong Kar-Wai’s films Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love, but at their cores, the three films are about saudade.
In the Mood for Love follows neighbors Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan. Over the course of the movie, which is set in the cramped urban environment of 1960s Hong Kong, the two realize that not only are their spouses cheating with each other, but they too have feelings for one another. However, due to the immense geopolitical forces pulling Hong Kong and its inhabitants in different directions, Chow and Chan are unable to realize their love, and they ultimately drift off into the world apart, each cherishing their shared memories of life in an overcrowded Hong Kong.
And in Chungking Express, we see a more hopeful interpretation of saudade play out in Hong Kong, particularly with the story of Faye. As external pressures — this time, the pending transfer of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China — once again interfere with the plans of the city’s residents, Faye realizes she is running out of time to make good on her dream of escaping the city and seeing California with her own eyes. Her budding love for the unnamed police officer is cut short, and even the plausible re-connection for the two revealed at the end seems untenable when contextualized with the realities of visas and career demands and finances.
Neither of the Wong Kar-Wai movies examined here are musicals. Their stories are not told in English nor set in the 21st century. But their decisions to center around romances that fail not because of emotional incompetence, infidelity, or incompatibility make it clear they have far more in common with La La Land than it may appear at first glance.
The same can be said for the other examples I listed. In Casablanca, when Rick tells Ilsa that they’ll “always have Paris,” that’s saudade. Theodore’s realization that he’s in love with Samantha arriving as she figures out how to transcend the physical bounds of reality in Her is saudade. The doomed love of Marianne and Héloisë, who are ripped apart by the societal norms of 18th century France, render Portrait of a Lady on Fire a painting of saudade.
Virtually the entirety of Past Lives and Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy is saudade, with Céline’s delivery of “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane” as Before Sunset closes still liable to bring tears to my eyes.
And in none of these examples could the characters realistically have done anything different to change their circumstances and save their love. Just like Seb and Mia, Ilsa had no choice. She needed to flee Casablanca for the good of the Free French resistance, a truth of which Rick is painfully aware. Nora and Hae Sung, the protagonists of Past Lives, were separated as children, powerless to have changed their fates. Marianne and Héloisë were never going to be allowed to pursue a same-sex relationship in their era.
Linklater’s trilogy is perhaps the most complicated version of saudade, as his unique decision to have the in-universe time jumps match exactly to the real world length between films means we ultimately learn in the final film, Before Midnight, how Céline and Jesse’s love played out when given the chance. In other words, the 18 year gap between the trilogy’s first and last installments means that viewers discovering the movies in the current age have a different experience than those who watched each version as they were released, as the convenience of streaming makes it possible to peer behind the curtain of saudade that was otherwise present upon the premiere of the first and second films.
I even read Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as an example of saudade. I see Joel and Clementine as caught in a cycle of saudade, wiping their memories over and over in an attempt to finally create versions of themselves that are romantically compatible.
Whether our fates are changed for us by the creeping force of economic globalization, the transcendence of artificial intelligence to a higher plane of existence, Nazis, or the innate need to chase our dreams, the many examples of saudade on screen I listed here make it clear just how powerless we can be.
But these brutal, blameless romantic failures also imbue a special layer of beauty on top of the already magnificent experience of living in love by highlighting how many external factors had to break the right way for love to thrive, and it is saudade’s dual ability to emotionally devastate while making you grateful that makes it such a powerful narrative form.
Things I Recommend This Week
Why Is Adult Animation So Far Behind? | Lextorias (YouTube)
Bad influence | The Verge
The Invisible Man | Esquire
Wadeye’s fight for peace | ABC News (Australia)
The Life Of An International Minor League Baseball Player Has Never Been Simple | Defector
Do you have an examples of saudade that I didn’t mention here? Let me know with a comment so I can check it out:
Thank you for reading, and happy 2025!
My reflection on 2024 should be out next week