Love and the Unknowable: Encounters with the Other

Viewing options:
Our Time (2018): FREE

https://www.justwatch.com/au/movie/our-time
OR https://watch.plex.tv/watch/movie/our-time-2018-1...
Burning (2018): FREE

https://www.justwatch.com/au/movie/burning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n850d79ryAU ($4.99)
Fallen Leaves (2023): FREE

https://www.sbs.com.au/.../movie/fallen-leaves/2465420355840
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcbQW1ctL8A ($4.99)
We will explore three evocative films that stage romance as an encounter with the Other: Our Time (2018) by Carlos Reygadas, Burning (2018) by Lee Chang-dong, and Fallen Leaves (2023) by Aki Kaurismäki. Across these works, “the Other” is not simply a stranger from outside our world, but the beloved as irreducibly opaque, someone whose desires cannot be fully translated into our own terms. Love becomes less a story of mutual understanding than a confrontation with limits: what cannot be known, what cannot be controlled, and what cannot be secured.
In Our Time, a couple living on a bull ranch attempt to keep love spacious through an open marriage, only to find that freedom does not dissolve possession, it reroutes it. Esther’s attachment to an American horsebreaker reorganizes the relationship’s emotional geography, and jealousy arrives not as melodrama but as an existential problem: what does it mean to “share” a person who is, in the end, not shareable at all? The film’s long observational rhythms make intimacy feel like weather: slow-moving, enveloping, and occasionally violent.
In Burning, romantic interest is inseparable from interpretive pressure. A young man is drawn into a triangle with a woman who drifts in and out of view and a wealthy newcomer whose calm charisma feels like a provocation. When the woman disappears, the film refuses the comfort of explanation. Instead, it turns romance into a problem of evidence: what counts as “knowing” someone, and how quickly does desire become a demand for certainty? The mysterious other here is not supernatural, but social and epistemic: the kind of person the world seems to permit to remain unreadable.
Fallen Leaves shifts the register toward tenderness, but keeps the same philosophical core. Two lonely workers meet by chance in Helsinki and attempt to build a relationship out of small gestures and fragile hope, while life repeatedly interrupts them through miscommunication, precarity, and addiction. The “mystery” here is gentler: not threat but contingency. Love appears as something that might happen if two strangers can keep choosing each other without guarantees, without grand narratives, and without the fantasy of total transparency.
Across these films, romance is not a merger of two selves but a lived negotiation with alterity. Each asks a related question in a different key: can we love without turning the other into a possession, a story, or a solved problem?