Past Lives (2023), by Celine Song
THIS ARTICLE HAS SPOILERS
Once, my grandpa said that he dreamt in black and white. The hypothesis we had then to explain this curious fact was that, as he grew up watching only black and white movies, it was natural that his mental cinema worked like that while he was resting. Oh well. In the movie “Past Lives”, Nora’s husband reveals that she speaks Korean during her sleep, which means that she probably dreams in Korean too. Once again, the explanation comes from childhood: Nora lived in South Korea with her parents until she was twelve, when her family migrated to Canada. But Nora’s ties with Korea go far beyond the language spoken in her dreams.
It was twelve years after Nora Moon (Greta Lee) and her family went to Canada that her childhood sweetheart, Jung Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), finds her by chance through the Internet. He was actually looking for her, she — through an unpretentious search — finds out he was still thinking about her.
Nora, who in Korea was called Na Young, starts talking to Hae Sung through Skype. They keep talking for a while but, being both conscious that they won’t be able to travel soon to meet in person, Nora puts an end in their relationship. Later she will find out that it wasn’t an end, just a pause.
Nora and Hae Sung start talking again after twelve more years have passed. She lives in New York with her husband, Arthur (John Magaro), who shares with her not only the apartment, but also writing as a profession. Now Hae Sung can visit the Big Apple and meet Nora, during a few vacation days, marked by pouring rain, that will make them rethink the past, present and future.
The title of the film is justified by a conversation that Nora has first with Arthur when they first meet, then with Hae Sung when they meet again. The conversation is about a Korean word: “in-yun”, that means “fate” or “providence”. Every human interaction has “in-yun” — that is to say nothing happens without a reason — but only marriage involves the maximum degree of “in-yun”: for two people to get married, according to the Koreans, they need eight thousand connections of fate in past lives.
During a writing workshop, Nora hears from the lecturer that “some crossings cost a whole life”. Years before, from her mother Nora heard that “It’s true that if you leave you lose things, but you also gain things, too.” When the Young family chose to cross the globe and go to Canada, they lost and gained in gigantic proportions, as it happens with every big decision. When Nora chose to marry Arthur — to get a green card, she doesn’t hide it — another critical decision was made. It was then that she lost Hae Sung and, confronted with the possibility of recovering him, she hesitates in a silence full of dubious feelings.
We need to talk about numbers! On IMDb, it’s written that the number eleven can be found a few times in the movie, with eleven mythically representing two people who are each half of the same soul. But what called my attention was the presence of the number twelve: Nora leaves Korea when she is twelve, twelve years later she and Hae Sung start talking again, and twelve more years pass until they meet in person. The number can be found in several mythologies and beliefs: there are 12 apostles, 12 works of Hercules, 12 knights of the Round Table, 12 zodiac signs and, of course, 12 months in a year. The sun reaches the highest point in the sky at twelve o’clock, that’s why the number is considered symbol of the climax. At twenty-four and thirty-six years old, Nora and Hae Sung are different versions of the same people, those people who knew each other at twelve, and whose “original” version stayed imprinted in each other’s mind.
Celine Song was the first Asian woman to be nominated for an Oscar in the category Best Original Screenplay. Song took from her own experiences to create the movie, and it was even when she was sitting in a bar with her husband (also a writer) and her childhood sweetheart that she got the idea for the script. It’s not only the opening scene that is taken verbatim from real life: Celine also migrated from South Korea to Canada when she was a child, and then migrated again to the USA to work with writing. “Past Lives” is Song’s first film as a director.
When she is with Hae Sung, Nora confesses she feels more Korean but at the same time she is conscious about characteristics that set her apart from other Koreans, as a woman living away abroad. It’s a country she revisited with her husband, without telling Hae Sung, preventing an “in-yun” that could have been subtracted from the eight thousand that one day they might complete, in a future life. For now, there are the decisions made, with the conviction that living only once is the recipe for regret.
