Movie Review SSJ

The most devastating form of betrayal in love, as this film hauntingly suggests, is not the explosive rupture of a heated argument but the chilling indifference of a lover transformed into a stranger. The latter erases the relationship’s history entirely, inflicting a uniquely existential wound. In Love Puzzle, the male protagonist endures this trauma twice. The first instance—a one-sided infatuation where he is the object of unrequited love—leaves him intellectually perplexed but emotionally unscathed. The second, however, strikes at the core of his being: a mutual “destined love” declared as “I am your dream girl, and you are mine” is abruptly negated through denial and erasure. The film’s closing image—a trench-coated figure slumped in despondency—captures a psyche so fractured that the prospect of future love seems unimaginable. Here, the nonlinear chronology is no mere stylistic flourish but a mirror to the protagonist’s shattered emotional logic.

Temporal Fractures and the Illusion of Destiny
The film’s disorienting timeline initially masks its straightforward narrative: a man, haunted by an unresolved past relationship, becomes convinced he has encountered his predestined new love at a train station. He pursues her to a bar, engages in flirtatious anonymity, and arranges a clandestine hotel rendezvous—only for the tryst to be interrupted by her husband’s cowardly charade of ignorance. This cowardice, we later learn, sustains the marriage through willful denial. A pivotal scene occurs when the protagonist visits his former lover before his 1 PM bar appointment with the new woman. Here, the film inverts expectations: rather than mutual bitterness, he confronts a void. His ex-lover treats him with the blank detachment of a stranger, weaponizing the same indifference that will later destroy him. Crucially, this “retaliation” rings hollow—without emotional investment, the cruelty becomes performative, a pyrrhic victory.

The husband’s subsequent interview on love—positioning romance as either a choice or a predetermined fate—echoes the film’s central tension. While the narrative initially seduces us with the allure of cosmic destiny (the train station encounter, the electric bar dialogue), it ultimately subverts this romanticism. The woman’s final return to her marriage—a “choice” framed as societal obligation—exposes love’s supposed destiny as a fragile construct. Like the resigned melancholia of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, the film’s avant-garde structure masks a deeply conservative undercurrent: love, however intense, must ultimately yield to pragmatic compromise.

The Ring as Temporal Anchor
Amid the chronological haze, a single prop—the ring—grounds the narrative. Early bar scenes show the woman wearing a ring on her right hand; later, after their tryst and a walk through the grass, she gifts it to the man. The opening scene, initially perplexing, is revealed through this detail to occur after the gift exchange. This subtle chronology deepens the film’s exploration of memory: the ring, a token of transient connection, becomes a relic of loss when returned in the final act. The director’s pessimism crystallizes here—not only does fated love fail, but its erasure must be absolute, leaving “not even a trace of memory.”

Strangers in the Eternal Present
The bar dialogues between the protagonist and the woman pulse with paradoxical intimacy. Even post-sex, they converse as enigmatic strangers, their exchanges echoing Italo Calvino’s definition of a literary classic: an encounter that feels perpetually new, no matter how often revisited. “Destined love,” the film posits, thrives in this liminal space—the thrill of the unknown, the beloved as an inexhaustible mystery. Yet this very dynamic seals their doom. When the protagonist whispers his lover’s name, the unspoken question lingers: Who, truly, am I calling? The tragedy lies in their mutual recognition that to “know” each other would collapse the fantasy.

Conclusion: The Smokescreen Shatters
By layering temporal dislocations over a stark emotional core, Love Puzzle dissects love’s most poisonous duality: the human need to believe in destiny while fearing its implications. The trench-coated figure walking away in the final frame carries more than heartbreak—he embodies the death of romantic idealism. In this bleak calculus, the film suggests, only those who embrace love as a fleeting smokescreen, never interrogated or claimed, might survive its aftermath. All others are left sifting through chronological debris, searching for a ring that no longer fits.