Past Lives

Not Quite A Movie Review

In the summer of 2013, I spent a Sunday morning in the movie theatre watching Man of Steel. These were still early days in the DC v. Marvel movie wars and I had high hopes for the reboot of the Superman franchise. As it turned out, Man of Steel was a terrible movie and for most of it, I was holding my head in my hands and waiting for the agony to end¹. Except for the two minutes and thirty seconds when they played the trailer of Pacific Rim. Man, it was some trailer. I do not think it is possible to watch a Jaeger drag an oil tanker through the streets of Hong Kong, without breaking into spontaneous whooping and applause. I mean, just see it. That ten-second sequence alone was worth the ticket price.

Movie trailers - the great ones, at least - can do this. They can make you hold your breath and fill you with this sense of certainty, this conviction, that you cannot afford to miss this movie; and if you do, it’ll be your loss. Ten years after the Pacific Rim trailer, I experienced this feeling again during the trailer of Past Lives.

There were no Jaegers and oil tankers this time round - (perhaps age has sobered my tastes) - but a fleeting shot of the protagonists through the window of a subway. I was sold on that one shot. Of course, I had to watch the movie, and of course, I had to write about it². The following essay is not so much a review, as an attempt to understand what the movie says about love and immigration. I hope reading this will persuade you to watch this fabulous film.

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The little things are the ones that stay with you after you’ve left the movie theatre. The scribbled ‘Keys, Phone, Wallet’ on the wall of a dormitory room (the ritual incantation we all murmur at the doorway); the once-familiar ringtone of a Skype call that served as the soundtrack of a relationship; the moment when Nora (Greta Lee) embraces Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) – who has travelled thirteen hours to meet her for the first time in twenty-four years – and he does not know what to do with his hands. The little things are what make Past Lives, Celine Song’s debut directorial feature film, unforgettable.

Image Source: IMDB

It starts with a game all of us have played at some point in our lives. The camera rests on three people sitting at a bar. A man and a woman, both Asian, are leaning towards each other but we cannot hear them. The woman occasionally turns to the white guy who sits a little aloof and smiles at him; he offers a weak smile in return. Off-screen observers, mirroring our own curiosity, try to guess how the three could be related. As the onlookers spin their yarns around the lives of these people, the woman looks straight at them – at us – and we are compelled to avert our gaze. It is the only time we will look away from the screen for the next hundred minutes or so.    

In the first act of the movie, we are introduced to the tween sweethearts, Na Young and Hae Sung, as they stroll the streets of Seoul and visit parks on chaperoned dates. Na Young is yet to become Nora but the spectre of her impending emigration to Canada looms large over their fledgling romance. On their final walk back from school, they separate at a fork in the road. Their farewell is perfunctory and Hae Sung is sullen – not because he knows Na Young’s path will lead her across the Pacific to a different continent but because he knows he cannot stop her.

The second act of the movie briefly reunites them in their early twenties. They are no longer the children they left each other as, but are not ‘grown-ups’ yet either. They are feeling their way into adulthood and are happy to indulge in a nebulous relationship, surviving on video calls and emails. Until Nora, who is studying to be a playwright in New York, pulls the plug on their virtual courtship. She has crossed too many borders and has far too much at stake, she explains, to afford to get distracted. Hae Sung stoically accepts her decision and they part once again.

Another twelve years pass before Hae Sung decides to travel to New York to meet Nora, who is now married. It is in this third and final act – where the vulnerabilities and anxieties of Hae Sung, Nora and her husband, Arthur (John Magaro), converge – that the film truly sparkles. As Nora gives Hae Sung a guided tour of the city, emotions that had long been buried are unearthed. She is confused and conflicted, the choices of her past having locked her into the present. Hae Sung seems content merely to be in her presence; the intensity of his desire equalled only by his determination to not act on it. When we see the two of them through a window frame – in the subway, on a boat – it feels like we are in Arthur’s shoes, spying on the couple and waiting for their platonic resolve to falter. In the movie, Nora talks about ‘inyun’, the Korean belief that meetings between people are pre-destined through their interactions in past lives. It is inyun that keeps bringing Nora and Hae Sung together and Arthur recognizes himself as the third-wheel in this fated, fairy-tale romance. He begins to question his role in Nora’s life and grapples with the resulting insecurities, in a manner rarely portrayed in movies. All of these competing emotions reach a crescendo in the climatic sequence which seals the fate of the characters.

Past Lives is a masterful piece of cinema and the cast and crew deserve the accolades of the critics (and audiences) for their technical brilliance. However, in addition to the excellence of the craft, perhaps one of the reasons for the acclaim the movie has received, is its theme: the exploration of relationships in the age of immigration.

The world is increasingly becoming a place where people are fluid, moving within and across state borders. The quest for prosperity makes one leave old lives and homes behind in the search for new ones, but these migrations are never absolute. You may move to a different city or country and adopt its customs, but you cannot completely shed your earlier life, your language, your identity. The people you leave behind can lay claim to a part of you that those who surround you in your new avatar can never access. And so, when these figures from the past reappear in your present – as happens with Nora – your reality is disrupted.

Meeting Hae Sung in New York is a discordant note in the placid American life that Nora has created for herself. Unlike stereotypical depictions of love triangles, it is not adulterous passion or the inevitability of inyun that assails Nora. Her dilemma in the final act of the movie is not triggered by Hae Sung, the childhood crush, but by Hae Sung, as an embodiment of the alternate lives where she never left Seoul, never met her husband, never became Nora. His presence makes these alternate realities feel more tangible and compels Nora to question the choices of her past that have locked her into the present. Would different choices have led to a different – better – life?

These parallel lives are what immigrants, like Nora, carry with them wherever they go. It is what causes them to be forever split; forever occupying a liminal place that straddles both the past and the present – no more the young Korean girl Hae Sung fell in love with, but dreaming in a language her husband does not understand.

The uncertain potential of these lives is what drives people to move; allows them to uproot themselves and lay new foundations elsewhere. But it also means that the joys of future discoveries are always tinged with the regret of an unfulfilled past. Perhaps the words of a different expatriate, Lt. Nescaffier (Stephen Park), from a different movie, The French Dispatch, are best suited to describe this condition: “Seeking something missing. Missing something left behind.”

Note: An abridged version of this essay was published in the Indian Express.

1. I do not, as a rule, walk out of movies. The only time I broke this rule was when watching Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji. There isn’t much I remember about it and I hope to keep it that way for the rest of my life.

2. You need not worry about spoilers. There is nothing in the essay (plot-wise) you wouldn’t already know from watching the trailer.