Past Lives - An Aching Exploration Of Familiarity And Love In The Quest For Forging Our Own Identity

The premise of Past Lives hinges on the Korean word In-Yun, which means the providence or fate that unites two people across several lifetimes and births. Centred around two childhood best friends Na Young (who adopts the name Nora after immigration to Toronto) and Hae Sung, Past Lives tackles the complexities of love and longing over the span of 24 years.

The film is primarily told from the point of view of Nora, whose family immigrated when she was still a child. In the 24-year journey that the film chronicles, we see the paths of Hae Sung and Nora cross twice, each with a gap of twelve years. The first time their paths cross is over social media, twelve years after Nora has immigrated. What starts off as briefly exchanging texts with the excitement of having found a long-lost friend, eventually metamorphoses into daily video calls over Skype, speaking for hours at length as they attempt to bridge the gap in their present lifestyles with words. For Hae Sung, Nora was the glaringly absent part of his childhood, a void that he had filled up with the memories they had shared as children, walking home together. Getting to reconnect with her presented an opportunity for Hae Sung to rekindle the bond they had shared as children. For Nora, Hae Sung was her only connection to a past she had left behind more than a decade ago. It was her only source to tap into the innocence of her childhood, the one piece of the puzzle that was her childhood that had stayed intact amidst the chaos and hustle of migrating to another country. They both had their reasons for attempting to reconnect, but with each passing day, as the longing for each other grew and laptop screens became too small to contain their feelings, the difficult question arose. Who would travel the distance? As they started making plans to travel to Seoul or New York City (where Nora had shifted to sometime between the first twelve-year gap), the lines between familiarity and love started blurring. With no resolution seeming likely to their dilemma of distance, the bond they shared started to develop an air of futility around it. And with their careers at stake, it seemed both had resigned their relationship to the hands of fate. The relationship eventually comes to a standstill as Nora reaches her saturation point, insinuating that they should probably avoid talking for a while because she had to focus on her career as a writer. This first part comes to an end as both seemingly find love in the embrace of other people, seemingly moving on from the brief bond that they shared.

The second twelve-year gap seems to hurt a little more than the first one. The first gap was brought about by changes that are common in life. Immigrating to a first-world country so that you can forge your own identity (As Nora said, she wouldn’t be able to win her Nobel and Pulitzer prizes while living in Seoul) is something very common. The pain of uprooting your entire life to find a home somewhere else is often masked by the promise of a life that brims with fulfilment and satisfaction. It felt painful, but it felt necessary. The second gap made my heart wrench because of the infinitesimal possibilities their relationship had until it reached an abrupt dead-end. It ended on a happy note as both seemed to have found love, but then it left me with this heartbreaking question: Were the foundations of their new relationships forged on the remains of the perishing bond they shared?

Cut to twelve years later, where we see Nora, now a playwright, who is now married to Arthur, the same man she fell in love with back then. Meanwhile, Hae Sung broke up with the girl he was dating. At this point in the film, all the simmering romantic tension comes to the forefront as hands come threateningly close to each other, words are hesitantly spoken, distances are begrudgingly maintained and love and longing are reluctantly suppressed into the obscure crevices of the heart.

Nora seems to have achieved stability and calmness in her life. But for some reason, it feels like there is an asterisk or condition attached to them. I wondered if the calmness was because she had reached where she wanted to in life or whether it signified her desolation as she chose to silently accept whatever destiny dished out to her. Her reunion with Hae Sung makes it evident that it is the latter. With Hae Sung, she seems happy. The dichotomy of the bonds she shares with Arthur and Hae Sung makes me wonder, is the comfort of familiarity really any different from the warmth of love? She loves Arthur but with him, there seems to be some sort of emptiness to her existence. When she is with Hae Sung, it feels like she has suddenly started to get to know herself better. Or maybe it was the fact that she started to remember who she really was. There is a scene where she explains the reason for her comfort with Hae Sung to Arthur and says that while she has encountered many Korean-Americans like her, who are an amalgamation of everything they were born with and everything they acquired over the course of their life in the States, Hae Sung was a “Korean-Korean” or a pure Korean. That purity also resembled the kind of innocence that is always present in the bonds that are forged in our childhoods. Our school friends, our parents and close family tend to be a level above everyone else simply because there was no sort of motive involved in forging those bonds. Sometimes we may outgrow our friends, but even if the words dry up, the familiarity wouldn’t.

Hae Sung’s presence for that one week led to some pertinent questions being raised in Arthur and Nora’s relationship. Arthur felt he was being an interruption in her love story with Hae Sung, to which Nora tries to reiterate the fact that she still loves Arthur. Arthur’s response is probably my favourite dialogue from the film. He says, ”I don’t forget the fact that you love me, I just have trouble believing it sometimes.” This one line highlights the kind of distance present in their relationship. Despite loving her, Arthur feels like there is an entire part of Nora that emanates from her being Korean that he will never be able to access. Maybe he loved her just like Hae Sung, but his love was crippled by his inability to provide the kind of familiarity that Hae Sung had.

Neatly weaving in Nora’s married life to her encounter with Hae Sung, Past Lives becomes a lot about the What-If’s of their lives. Not just in terms of where their relationship could have been, but also the kind of people they may have been had the circumstances been any different. This isn’t a love triangle that tries to villainise any of the characters involved. It attempts to show how being content with someone doesn’t always extinguish the quest for what could have been. Past Lives also addresses the complexity of longing and how it is so often intertwined with an attempt to retrieve a part of oneself that gets lost in the mundane daily struggles of life. None of the emotions in the film are exaggerated or in your face. They are subtle and muted because just like in real life, we often hide these feelings deep down within us, only for them to resurface several years later after a chance encounter. The final confrontation as Hae Sung talks to Nora about the possibilities had she stayed back in Korea just goes to show the kind of weight these seemingly trivial decisions seem to hold in our life. One flight taken, one connection missed and our lives pan out entirely different. Strongly reminiscent of the moodiness and melancholy that Wong Kar Wai brought to his films, Celine Song shows us an eternal relationship with multiple possibilities only to drag us back into the realisation that there is only one reality.