There is an impossible sense of trepidation when it comes to remembering the blurry images of a childhood-defining film. There is a similar sense of trepidation when an article idea bolts into consciousness, propelling the unlucky writer to discard all responsibilities and dig into the recesses of the mind and the web hoping to strike at the reason behind this electrifying feeling in order to compose the next great personal essay.

Perhaps they are not the same. One is entirely Proustian; the other, some self-indulgent shit.

In any case, it was around 8 p.m. in late February when Spotify played me the song “Reality” composed by Vladimir Cosma and performed by Richard Sanderson, and it was around midnight on the same stormy day when the urge to rewatch the 1980 French romantic comedy La Boum surfaced. I encountered the film for the first time around the age of twelve, in the company of my mom and my younger sister, back when we still lived in suburban Paris. If you search La Boum on YouTube, you’ll likely stumble upon—even before the bande-annonce—a four minute and forty-five second fanmade montage set to the aforementioned song, a soundtrack hit and a recurring motif throughout the movie. Immediately upon listening to it, I was filled with a profound nostalgia I couldn’t quite place. The late hour probably played a role, but it was this song, the notes of a bitter homecoming, that provoked in me a sudden emotion which expressed itself in the form of some hot, heavy tears. But why?

La Boum follows the life of thirteen-year-old Vic as she navigates her first adolescent experiences: a tumultuous first love, the joys and complexities of female friendship, an irrational yet deeply relatable fear of judgment, and the difficulty of communicating with her parents, both distanced by a generational gap and their own crumbling marriage. Her main preoccupations centre around dating a guy named Matthieu and attending boums, those crucial social gatherings more commonly known as ‘parties.’ It is a classic coming-of-age story. Yet it isn’t one I should, logically, feel connected to. The film was released in 1980; I made my earthly debut in 2006. Vic is thirteen when she hangs out with her great-grandmother; my grandmother, whom I loved dearly, died when I was ten. Almost everyone in Vic’s world is white except for a Black classmate and an Asian server; I was brought up by Chinese women and only spoke Mandarin until kindergarten. Also, I hate parties and have no interest in guys. The 70s aesthetics usher the viewer into a long-lost time, when iPhones didn’t exist, no one met through dating apps, and people actually danced at parties. Was it in typical it-was-better-before fashion, then, that I yearned to travel to this unfamiliar reality?

I left France at thirteen. In a sense, dreams were my reality. A few months before moving, I began tracing on the foggy shower door the words ‘CANADIAN DREAM.’ Once, on an errand with my sister on a quest for tofu, I told her how immensely excited I felt to be finally free from this place, this city, this country. In her eyes, I found an accusation. She said, “But won’t you miss your friends? Our life?” and I heard, “You are being unfair right now.” She was right, of course. I had loving friends, we lived in a nice house which my mom worked on renovating for over two years. We had expressly moved to this area for the reputation of the lycée, and now that we had finally settled, things were about to change again, and drastically so. I found in my sister’s eyes an accusation, and this accusation was echoed by the loss in my chest of this unwavering belief in one’s own goodness, which I had nursed from childhood until then. After moving to Toronto, I spent a solitary year in the company of a notebook, darkening pages and pages whenever I could to avoid talking to people and processing the changes both my mind and body were undergoing: in the morning, at lunch breaks, in my room instead of sleeping. It was during those evenings that I first heard my parents fighting. Like Vic, their marriage broke down while my sister and I were away (our first stop when we arrived in August 2019 was a summer music camp), but unlike her, they didn’t tell us outright when they came to pick us up. Something had shifted, and this something went unacknowledged for an additional nineteen months. 

Maybe, then, my affection for La Boum springs from the recognition that upon my first viewing, I already knew what awaited our family, and am now able to experience it again from the time of the aftermath? Perhaps the movie fills this urge to imagine what could have been if my parents had, like Vic’s, gotten their happy ending? If they were, like Vic’s, meant for one another? The issue with this reflection lies in that they are not. The issue with this reflection lies in that it is only a trick of memory. At the time of my first viewing, my parents’ marriage had not deteriorated enough for me to even contemplate a potential separation, and so this is a wishful reflection I am imposing on my twelve-year-old self, an attempt to make sense of the present by dragging this private tragedy into a remote past.

Still, nostalgia ripples in my ribcage. La Boum is many things, but at its core it’s Paris; the pictures my French friends post on Instagram, the evenings they spend at clubs and cafés, all that I’ve never experienced, and now never will. La Boum is the amber hues of childhood, the fading ray of innocence falling across Vic’s face as she falls in and out of love while slow-dancing to disco tunes.

In a way, FOMO lives on, as I, a commuter student, am now jealous of those living in res. But as Vic remarks of her reunion with Matthieu to her friend Pénélope, “it was like a movie.” I am far from the only one who didn’t and will never get to be Vic. Most of us never do. Life isn’t a movie. And dreams aren’t your reality… though we can always try to make them so.