The Top 5 Moments of Yearning in Film
Film can cover a range of emotions within a relatively short amount of time. The most powerful emotions displayed for viewers is desire, longing, or yearning. This can take the form of unrequited love, nostalgia, lust, or even homesickness. From Casablanca’s “We’ll Always Have Paris” moment to Gatsby pining after a woman who never truly loved him, on-screen yearning is all over film history.
This is not a definitive Top 5 list; nor do I want any of the lists that I make to be seen that way. I haven’t seen every movie ever, I’ll blank on something eventually, and also definitive lists are silly—they can’t exist. That being said here is a list of five moments in film that I found to be beautiful examples of yearning. Also, be aware, spoilers for Walkabout. If you plan on watching it (I highly suggest you do) then don’t read that section)
5. Lion
The 2016 movie does a beautiful job of showing trauma and pain. It’s about a young boy in India who is separated from his family and after a series of hardships is later adopted by an Australian couple. 25 years later he begins a search to reunite with his mother.
It is not from the moments of seeking out his lost family that I am focusing on, however. It is when he is a child and yearning to go home. Sunny Pawar, who plays the protagonist in his younger years, is an incredible actor who portrays his homesickness in such a heartbreaking way. There is a scene in which he repeats “good boy,” which his mother had said to him while moving rocks as he used to help her do. This moment to me was so small and subtle but yet incredibly powerful. The quietness in his voice and almost robotic speech and movement as he stares into space exemplifies how lost and alone he feels. The viewer mourns alongside him as he longs to be home with his family.
4. Walkabout
Maybe the most unconventional coming-of-age film ever made, this 1971 Australian movie centers around a brother and sister abandoned by their father in the Outback who must learn to survive. Their teacher is a young Aborigine boy on his Walkabout who they happen to run into in the wilderness. The yearning here falls on both the teenage girl and the Aborigine boy who fall in love but are separated by their two drastically different cultures and inability to vocally communicate with each other. Towards the end of the film when the two city children choose to go home instead of staying with him, the boy performs a traditional dance for her all throughout the night until he physically exhausts himself. His desperate dancing is the only way that he can communicate to her unrequited love and it is devastating.
3. A Ghost Story
After he dies in a car accident, a man comes back as a ghost and is confined to the space in which he lived before his death. The use of sheets to illustrate a ghost may seem hokey if you haven’t seen the film but it works incredibly to create a sense of loss in his empty, black eyes. The moment in particular that I am choosing to highlight for this film is when he sits, defeated, at a piano alone in a house that he once shared with the woman he loved, looking longingly in the distance.
2. Wanda
Wanda is a little different than what most people would consider a film about yearning to be; it is not a woman yearning for a man, or for an object, or really anything in particular. Rather, it is just a movie about a woman who is yearning for anything. For belonging, acceptance, and purpose. I can’t narrow it down to just one scene, though, because Wanda is a character that just lets life happen to her and every moment builds on a previous film.
1. In the Mood For Love
There is no movie that better defines the word “yearning” than Wong Kar-Wai’s 2000 period piece about two people who find out their spouses are cheating on them with the other’s. The two decide to reenact how the affair must have started but cannot bring themselves to actually cheat on their respective partners. Thus becomes the most tragic love story of all: love that is real and requited but can never be carried through. There is a moment late in the movie where the two speak in an alley where this reality begins to close in on them and the looks they give each other and the light touch he brings to her hand, say more than any melodramatic monologue ever could.