Kyss Mig: The Break in Every Beat
On Dec. 11th, the writer Masha Tupitsyn posted this image:

It’s all about that line, that break. The little (heart)break in every heartbeat.
The image made me think of the pop song “With Every Heartbeat” in which Robyn repeats that “it hurts with every hearbeat,” and that made me think of the film I’d heard that song in earlier this year, Kyss Mig, also titled Kiss Me and With Every Heartbeat. The film was released in 2011, but I saw it this year (on Netflix, where it can still be viewed under the title Kiss Me), and it is one of the defining films of my 2013.
In my recent piece on the year’s best games, I praised Gone Home, a story of a queer teenager’s self-discovery and first love. I wrote, “Maybe Gone Home’s coming-of-age story resonated with me more deeply than most because, although I’m older than she is, I’m still experiencing some of the feelings that Sam experiences in the game. In a very real way, I’m still coming of age myself.”
But teenagers don’t have a monopoly on self-discovery, and I need stories of women who are closer to my age who are still learning about themselves and learning to live more authentic lives, too. Kyss Mig isn’t an extraordinary film. It’s thoroughly conventional and formulaic. This might be part of why I like it so much. The film’s unabashedly standard structure reinforces the idea that it’s normal to still be figuring out who you are even when, like me and like Mia, you’re in your 30s.
To some extent, I see myself in both of Kyss Mig’s main characters. Certainly I look more like Frida, and like her, I can be awkward and goofy and…umm…

Yes! Exactly, Mia! Thank you! Uncharming.

But Frida knows who she is. It’s really Mia’s journey in the film that speaks to me.
They meet at a party celebrating the birthday of Mia’s father Lasse, and his engagement to Frida’s mother Elisabeth. Mia has also just become engaged to Tim, her boyfriend of seven years and her business partner.



Later, Frida and Mia are both staying at Elisabeth’s isolated island house. Mia asks Frida if she’s been married, and Frida says that the closest she came was an engagement that fell apart because she discovered that she didn’t know who she was engaged to. And then we get what I think is one of the key exchanges of the film.


Frida isn’t looking to have her world rocked. That kind of intensity can be painful. “It hurts with every heartbeat.”
But she offers Mia her hand anyway.

Then we get this otherworldly moment, this place where the lighting makes me think the characters have stepped out of space and time.


Of course, this is when and where it happens.




Mia pulls herself away and stumbles off, in turmoil.


But conveniently, the two are trapped on the island. The next day, Mia is short with Frida, and when the two of them and Elisabeth take a boat out and go fishing, she avoids Frida’s glances. But when the two find themselves alone briefly, she gives in to Frida’s advances, and when the two of them and Elisabeth ride bikes back toward the house, she clings to Frida in a way that makes her heartache and confusion apparent.

And when the love scene comes around, as it must, it works because it is more interested in revealing character than revealing bodies. In contrast to the sex scenes in this year’s Palme d'Or-winning lesbian coming-of-age drama Blue is the Warmest Color, which I felt were staged for the benefit of the audience and therefore rang false and weren’t sexy to me at all, I find the scene in Kiss Me very effective because it is fraught with the complexity of what Mia is feeling. Yes, there are glimpses of breasts and bodies, but the focus is on the communication of hands and faces.


It’s slow, almost reluctant, the way Mia turns toward Frida. This is not the simple, one-level sex we see in so many films. For Mia, the desire to connect and be vulnerable clashes with the impulse to deny, to stay guarded. When you’ve spent your whole life denying who you are, the chance to start chipping away at that wall, to discover and share what’s on the other side, is both tempting and terrifying. I know this well.




This is not easy, happy, uncomplicated love. (Nothing in my life is ever uncomplicated.) Mia’s love for Frida just doesn’t fit into the life she has made for herself. She is torn in two. She is fighting with herself.




And when Frida says

it sounds like a curse.
It is not easy and uncomplicated for Frida, either. The film keeps it from us for most of the first hour, but she already has a girlfriend she lives with. (Clearly a girlfriend she likes a lot, but as her own words tell us, one who does not “rock her world.”) Though things with Mia seem hopeless, Frida can’t carry on with Elin any longer.

I like that the film doesn’t let Frida and Mia off the hook morally. They don’t get toothless, Bill Pullman to Meg Ryan, “I just want you to be happy” style breakups. We may still want the “happy” ending for Frida and Mia, but we recognize that it comes at an emotional cost, that they are leaving people’s wrecked lives in their wake.
And there are images of isolation, of both Elin (in the same room with Frida but emotionally alone) and of Mia. Love is really very lonely sometimes.


When, some weeks later, Mia comes to a concert where Frida’s students are performing, she tries to sneak off unseen. Even after being spotted by Frida who pleads with her to wait, Mia hides, not only from Frida but from what she wants, from who she is. It still terrifies her.

The only way Mia can conceive of the dream of being with Frida is if the two of them start a new life. In her mind, it is not compatible with her existing life.

I think of how I once envisioned my own future. Transition, I felt, was totally incompatible with my existing life. I could not imagine being known as a trans woman by coworkers, by people in my town. I had to go “stealth,” starting a new life with a new job somewhere. It was the only way I could see it working. If you had told me even five years ago that I would eventually be (very) publicly out as a trans woman, I would have said you were crazy. In her own way, Mia is stuck in that place. This becomes the source of conflict between her and Frida in the film’s final act. When Mia talks about starting over with Frida somewhere far away, Frida asks why she won’t start over with her right there, in their existing lives.


At this point, Frida’s world is well and truly rocked, and it hurts.




The two resolve to be together, but Mia still attends a meeting with the priest who is going to conduct her wedding to Tim. While she’s there, her phone beeps impatiently with Frida’s text messages, as Frida waits alone for Mia, who is late for their meeting. It’s a contrived but effective situation. Mia clearly feels the suffocating future of a life with Tim closing in on her…

…and she runs away, truly determined at last to be with Frida. But for Frida, it is too little, too late.




“You won’t fight for us,” Frida says. I’m reminded again of one of Masha Tupitsyn’s posts, this one from September 17th.

The text at the bottom reads, “And also: Put up a fucking fight for WHO you love.”
Don’t we all hate the feeling that we’re not as important to someone we love as we thought we were, that we’re not a priority to someone who is a priority to us? Don’t we all want to be fought for?
Sometimes fighting for love brings us closer to those we love. At other times it pushes them away. I want to fight for love, and to be fought for. Fighting for love, and for the people and the ideas I love, comes naturally to me. Surrendering does not. I’m trying to learn to pick my battles, and hoping that sooner rather than later I find myself in a battle I actually have a chance of winning.
Frida is right, though, that Mia has not fought for her, for them, and so she runs away.
And so one last time I think of Masha Tupitsyn’s work, how she says in her excellent piece “No, That Wasn’t Our Happiness”:
You know how in movies people realize, change their minds, go after what/who they once let go—act? Love strikes, love emboldens, love returns, haunts, is more than just a random occurrence. Love changes being. You know how in the movies people realize they were wrong and then mend that wrong? Get in the car and on that plane and mend that wrong. The way mending wrongs—since we can’t seem to not wrong each other—becomes one of the odysseys we must all go on, and what movies are largely about. Worse not to mend a wrong than to commit a wrong. Shit happens. Lots of shit happens. But to not mend? Not knowing when and how you should mend? Not feeling anyone is worth mending and being mended for?
Kyss Mig is definitely precisely the type of film in which people get in the car and on that plane and mend that wrong. For Mia, who in her 30s, has finally learned to stop pretending and accept herself,

the undertaking is a small odyssey, a heroic quest in which she must cast aside her pride and face obstacles and enemies at every turn–Elin,

and Tim, who is viciously cruel to her now and laments the seven years they spent building a life together,

and Elisabeth, who wants to protect her daughter from more heartbreak.


By throwing herself at the mercy of these people, by getting in the car and on that plane, Mia proves that she is now ready, is now worthy. And so Mia and Frida share a smile, and we know the wrong is mended, and we know these two will be all right, and Robyn sings that it hurts with every heartbeat.



I think of Mia with Tim for seven years and her awakening with Frida, and me being single for seven years and experiencing a kind of awakening this year, and how it’s a painful process, this being woken up. I haven’t really minded living alone, spending my nights alone these past several years. Now I’m sometimes bouncing off the walls of my apartment, hungry for experience, yearning for contact. Tired of being alone.
I think of how we need to fold our dreams into our realities if we want to have any hope of realizing them. I think of Bruce Springsteen singing “I’m dyin’ for some action. I’m sick of sittin’ around here tryin’ to write this book,” how you can’t start a fire sitting around cryin’ over a broken heart. To put it another way, to bring it back to what Mia and Frida said earlier about the rocking of worlds:
"A careful man tries to dodge the bullets
While a happy man takes a walk.“
Maybe it’s time to live.
Los Angeles, Dec. 22nd & 23rd, 2013
Notes
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