그렇게 우린 다시 만나게 됐어

The line, explained

This is a voice-over line. The film has shown you the coincidences, the missed train, the wrong café, and now the narrator sums it up: and that's how we met again. The Korean ending -게 되다 carries the whole philosophy of the scene. Nobody decided this. It came about. Learn it and you will start noticing how often Korean describes life as something that happens to people rather than something they do.

그렇게 means 'like that' or 'in that way', from 그렇다, to be so. At the start of a sentence, after a story has been told, it means 'and so', 'that's how'. It is the storyteller's hinge. 우린 is 우리는, we, squeezed into two syllables, with the topic marker telling you the focus has turned to the two people. 다시 is again. 우린 다시 is a pair you will meet in a thousand lyrics: we, again, as if the first time was never going to be enough.

만나다 is to meet. 만나게 됐어 is the grammar point: stem 만나, plus -게, plus 되다 (to become) in the casual past, 됐어. Literally, 'it became so that we meet'. The meaning is 'we came to meet', 'we ended up meeting', with the strong sense that the meeting was arranged by circumstance, fate, or someone else, not by the speakers. Compare the plain 만났어, we met, which says nothing at all about how it happened.

-게 되다 attaches to every verb the same way, with no vowel or consonant rules: 알게 됐어, I came to know; 배우게 됐어, I ended up learning; 떠나게 됐어, I ended up having to leave. It is also the polite way to announce news without taking credit or blame: 결혼하게 됐어요, it has come about that I'm getting married. In a film, that modesty becomes romance. The characters did not chase each other. The world folded them back together.

Say it as a narrator would, evenly: geu-reo-ke u-rin da-si man-na-ge dwae-sseo. No word is stressed, because the point is that nothing was forced. Then change only the verb and watch the film change genre: 그렇게 우린 다시 사랑하게 됐어, and so we came to love again; 그렇게 우린 다시 헤어지게 됐어, and so we ended up parting again. The ending stays gentle even when the news is not.