Strange to say, lately I’ve developed a preference for old films, and I rewatched A Romance of Blood and Passion and Con Air, and found I still enjoyed them quite a bit. To be honest, one’s a TV drama and the other an action film — they don’t have much in common, at most a shared sense of nostalgia on my part. But I love the plain, understated, lingering moments in both, and the ordinary way each story winds down between two people. I’m drawn to understated narratives (though the latter is hardly understated by any means), and even when a story unfolds gradually, it never lacks for humanity and spirit. Once a character has presence, they shine all the brighter on screen. What I want to talk about here is the reunion in each.

Zhong Yuemin in A Romance of Blood and Passion is a deeply complicated man. Restless by nature, bold enough to take risks, yet genuinely capable. As the show itself puts it, he’s no ordinary fellow — given the chance, he could accomplish great things. He goes to the countryside in northern Shaanxi as a “rusticated youth,” and falls in love with Qin Ling, a fellow Beijing transplant who sings folk songs. But reality doesn’t let love stay: he returns to the army, while she remains in Shaanxi. Many years later, after Zhong Yuemin is discharged from the military, he hears news of Qin Ling through a roundabout path, and goes to the theater to hear her perform, where they reunite backstage in the dressing room. He tells her he’s been searching for her all along, that he’s loved her the whole time. The years of separation seem not to have dimmed the feeling between them at all — but sadly, too much has happened by then, and in the end they still don’t end up together.

The reunion in Con Air is far simpler. Cage’s character, having injured someone while protecting his wife, ends up serving time in prison. After waiting seven years, the day of his parole finally arrives — only for the plane home to be hijacked by inmates. After a string of action sequences, Cage subdues the hijackers, and the plane makes an emergency landing in Las Vegas. Amid the night, the lights, the ambulances, he and his wife exchange what feels like an almost formal greeting — and that is their reunion.

The reunion in A Romance of Blood and Passion is far more complicated than the one in Con Air — after all, the latter is just a small interlude within a tough-guy action film. I’ve always felt that no matter who Zhong Yuemin ends up with in the end, Qin Ling is his one true love. No matter what, he will never forget that girl in the worn-out padded jacket on the hillside across from him, singing folk duets back and forth. The nature of these two reunions is very different. Zhong Yuemin’s reunion looks happy on the surface, but is in fact riddled with uncertainty. Qin Ling was never a woman he could fully hold onto, which is exactly why he didn’t try to keep her — or perhaps he simply lacked the ability to, given everything going on. Their reunion points toward the shattering of an illusion, while what Cage faces is brimming with boundless hope. He spent so many days in prison consumed by longing, and I understand that process must have been agonizing: trapped in a small room he couldn’t leave, all he had to hold onto were a handful of happy memories from before. And yet, both of these reunions dramatically changed the protagonists’ lives.

I used to often wonder: is there really such a thing as someone who likes reunions? The protagonists of these two films certainly aren’t — for them, reunion is born more out of helplessness than desire. So what would someone who genuinely likes reunions be like? Surely someone for whom fantasy outweighs reality, surprise outweighs the mundane, and longing outweighs actually living it out. As for me, I think it’s best not to have reunions at all — that way I avoid the overthinking, and avoid the remembering too. Maybe some reunions really are “lucky,” but luck like that only happens when you’ve engineered the reunion yourself. There’s a lyric that puts it well: the time between saying goodbye to one and reuniting with another is nothing more than the new year replacing the old.