The Conflict Between Endless Possibilities and Reality
Greta Lee and Teo Yoo in the movie Past Lives (Jon Pack / Sundance Institute).
Director Celine Song’s Past Lives gives a glimpse into three moments in the life of Na Young Moon (later known as Nora Moon). As a 12-year-old, Na-Young emigrates from South Korea to Canada, leaving behind her name and her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung. Twelve years later, Nora is in the United States, having immigrated to New York, and reconnects with Hae Sung over Skype. Twelve years after that, Nora is married, and Hae Sung comes to visit her in New York, where they reunite for the first time in more than twenty years.
Through these three spans of life, we see the contrasts between the countless possibilities and permutations that life spreads before us and what realities life can actually hold. However, instead of looking to the future possibilities of the relationship between Nora and Hae Sung, the film looks to the past possibilities that have been extinguished through Nora’s lifetime of growing up, of emigration, of making the decisions that shape a reality.
Still from Past Lives (Twenty Years Rights).
The first two spans of Nora’s life that we see are heavily impacted by Nora’s emigration. As a child, Na Young is pulled away from the life she knows, and the possibilities that she had in that life are wiped away with the name she leaves behind. In a moving scene early in the film, Na Young tells her mother that she likes Hae Sung, and that “[she] will probably marry him.” The mother looks down at the family passports in her hand, playing along, though both know that they will be emigrating soon. Na Young’s mother arranges a date at a park for Na Young and Hae Sung, and though the date and Na Young’s words about marriage are full of possibility and a promised future, Na Young and her family soon leave Korea, wiping away that possibility.
When Nora and Hae Sung reunite over Skype years later, they strike up a deep friendship, video calling at strange hours, though the distance is too much even with the facility of the internet. After a period of missed calls, Nora asks when Hae Sung can come visit her in New York, and when he replies that it won’t be for another year and a half, she replies in kind about a potential visit to Seoul. She ends their relationship. She has emigrated two times, she says, and she wants to commit to her life in New York; the two promised trips, to New York and Seoul, are extinguished from their futures too.
Still from Past Lives, (A24).
Though all living is a winnowing down of possibilities, emigration draws clearer lines between those possibilities, showcasing more literal breaks in a lifetime and stretching out the physical distance between parts of one’s life. Moving one city over could make as much of a change to someone’s life as moving a country over, but moving the country closes those doors more clearly.
Nora’s life would be different if she stayed in Korea. Nora’s life would be different if she stayed in Canada. Nora’s life would be different if she stayed in contact with Hae Sung, if Hae Sung could have come to New York sooner, if Nora went to visit him in Seoul. As we examine her present-day life with her husband Arthur in New York, we see the shadows of her possible lives. These shadows haunt her husband too.
When Hae Sung finally does visit New York, the visit unsettles Nora’s husband Arthur, who feels like the chance beginning of his relationship with Nora (meeting at an artist’s residency) is insubstantial compared to the story of his wife and her childhood sweetheart. “What if you met someone else at the residency?” Arthur wonders. “That’s not how life works,” Nora responds.
And of course, it isn’t. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t power, weight, and regret in the possibilities left behind. Hae Sung and Nora’s relationship and the infinite possibilities of their lives are incredibly important and impactful to both of them, even if the relationship only took place over a short period of their lives.
Celine Song addresses that power of possibility by having Nora invoke the idea of In-Yun, how fate and chance encounters in past lives build up to dictate relationships between people—with 8,000 layers of In-Yun leading to a marriage. But past lives aren’t only found in reincarnation. Nora has a myriad of past lives, from her childhood in Korea, from her mostly unshown life in Canada, to her burgeoning adulthood in New York, and then her present-day life with her husband and career as a playwright.
It is easier today to think of place and distance as less important than ever with the advent of the internet and better video communication. But place and distance consequentially changed the course of Nora and Hae Sung’s lives and relationship to each other at multiple points throughout their lives. When Nora and Hae Sung finally reunite, Hae Sung wonders: “What if I’d come to New York twelve years ago? What if you could have come to Seoul? What if you had never left? If you hadn’t left like that, and we just grew up together, would I still have looked for you? Would we have dated? Broken up? Gotten married? Would we have had kids together?”
All of these questions ricochet through the film, echoed by how these scenes are portrayed visually. Most of Nora and Hae Sung’s scenes together are outside, with plenty of open space around them. Nora and Arthur’s New York scenes mostly take place in their small, confined apartment. There is always space for endless possibilities, but there is only enough space in a lifetime for one path of living.
On Na Young and Hae Sung’s first and last date as children (which also takes place outside), Hae Sung’s mother asks Na Young's mother why she wants to emigrate and leave her successful life in Korea behind. Na Young's mother responds “If you leave something behind, you gain something too.” Though that sentence is framed as a tradeoff of one thing for another, the film makes an argument for the multiple. Nora, like all people, is constantly trading possible futures for other possible futures, then possible futures for a reality. But those imagined past lives and connections don’t lack meaning or impact either. Each change, movement, and decision may feel like closing the door to possibility, but it also dictates the shape of Nora’s reality, of the life that she wants to live, of the art that she wants to make. And though she leaves those past lives behind in a way, those past lives still exist and inform who she is. Those past lives are just as important to her as her reality.
Poster of Past Lives, 2023. Directed and written by Celine Song. Produced by David Hinojosa, Christine Vachon, and Pamela Koffler. Cinematography by Shabier Krichner. Distributed by A24. Starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro.
