Many unhappy returns: why Asian immigrant cinema is challenging the meaning of home

The fantasy is enticing, and has a tendency to emerge at times of discomfort. In stories about immigration, longing and loss, the idea of returning to the motherland can appear like an alluring siren call. It begins to feel like a place that will smooth away all your discomforts and restore you to your full self. When you reach it, the fantasy teases, you will be complete, and you will have found home.

Related: Past Lives review – a must-see story of lost loves, childhood crushes and changing identities

For the protagonists of Past Lives, the hotly tipped romance film by South Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song, the idea of a prodigal return is found less in a physical place, but in each other. Nora Moon and Hae Sung are 12-year-old friends and classmates in Seoul. Nora is an overachiever and quick to cry, which she does when Hae Sung pips her to first place in an exam. What’s the big deal, he asks her; you usually beat me.

Nora’s parents are planning to move to Toronto, and her mother wants to create lasting memories for her daughter in Korea before they leave. She asks Nora if she likes any boys; Nora mentions Hae Sung. They go on a playdate before she departs. Twelve years later, Nora is a playwright in New York and Hae Sung is an engineering student living with his parents in Korea. They reconnect by chance through Facebook, and begin Skyping. In a montage of their conversations, Nora and Hae Sung’s embodied physical lives seem indistinct, flimsy against the allure of the other onscreen. The world outside is largely seen by glimpses through each other’s windows; Seoul in the hazy afternoon, New York lit up at night.

The past few years have seen an explosion in movies from the Asian diaspora, with varied stories and styles that reflect the different communities under that vast umbrella. Patterns, though, can be seen, and several have depicted a character returning to their birth country, with all its delights and confusions. In Crazy Rich Asians – which, in 2018, was the first Hollywood blockbuster to feature a majority Asian cast in a quarter of a century – a Chinese-American woman joins her Singaporean boyfriend on a trip to meet his family. In Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, writer Billi departs New York to see her ailing grandmother in China; in Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul, a French woman, Freddie, reconnects with her birth parents in South Korea. This summer, the fantastically raunchy comedy Joy Ride depicts an American adoptee’s road trip across China in search of her birth mother.

The characters are often young and, unlike their parents, have spent most of their lives in the west; as a result, they can be prone to romantic and sometimes deluded ideas about their birthplaces. Increasingly, these films play with these ideas, teasing the fantasy of a reunion that delivers complete self-actualisation only to subvert it. The birth parents are reluctant or gone altogether; people discover not a sense of home, but a host of new complexes about their identities. When there is a thrumming sense of purpose, it can be hilariously perverse: Return to Seoul’s Freddie ends up taking a job importing missiles to South Korea. Her boyfriend tells her astonished family over lunch in Seoul that she believes it is her destiny to protect her birthplace.

Though Past Lives is less overtly concerned with family and identity, the stories of Nora and Hae Sung reveal another much used conceit of the fantasy of the prodigal return: that the person who leaves is the one filled with motion, the real possessor of plot, while those left behind remain static, lying in wait to issue a welcome. When a young Nora announces to her classmates that she is leaving to pursue her ambition of winning the Nobel prize for literature, no South Koreans have won it. The camera moves to show Hae Sung, looking hurt and withdrawn.

A common promotional image of the film of the two reuniting in New York, another 12 years after their (thwarted) Skype romance, suggests a different narrative. Sitting side by side, looking at each other, they take up equal parts in a frame, hinting at a future where their stories hold equal weight. The film, however, still ultimately tips towards Nora – it is her thoughts on the reunion that we hear, her life and ambitions depicted in detail – but as we see Hae Sung change over time, and witness how he clashes with Nora’s self-understanding, the folly of believing in reuniting with an eternally unchanged and comforting past becomes clear.

Related: Celine Song on adapting her life for surprise hit Past Lives: ‘It becomes its own story’

That is perhaps why watching movies that tell the other side of the experience, about those who remain, can feel like a satisfying tumble through the looking-glass. Mountains May Depart, a 2015 film by Chinese director Jia Zhangke, follows a couple living through social and economic changes in China from the 1990s. The film’s final third then suddenly leaps forward to 2024, when they have split up and the father has moved to Australia with their son, now a university student with bad Mandarin. It was strange to see the story of migration told without much ceremony; it was humbling to see an experience so usually thought of as individually seminal and singular folded into a larger story spanning generations.

Then again, some themes persist. The child’s mother remains in China, and has not seen her son in years. The film’s final moments tease a reunion between mother and child – he is shown getting on a plane – but demurs from showing it. Instead, we see his mother at her new home, humming as she looks wistfully out on to the horizon, listening to the song that we first see her dancing to, 25 years earlier, as a young shop girl – in those intervening years, she has lived many lives.