“Past Lives”: Why We Should Stop Romanticizing Soulmates
“There is a word in Korean. In-yeon. It means providence, or fate.”
A24’s recent indie film Past Lives sparked global intrigue after dropping a sentimental trailer earlier this year. Featuring two star-crossed lovers separated as children, the ill-fated duo try to stay together amidst geographical distances and inconvenient time zones.
Having moved away from Korea to become a writer in America, Nora fantasizes a series of what-if’s had she stayed in Korea to be with her first love. Through a charming montage of long-distance video calls, the pair faces an uphill battle to stay connected while focusing on their separate lives.
Past Lives resonated with fans around the world for its sensitive and often-heartbreaking reality about the migrant experiences of young families, about ill-fated romance, and about the turbulent twists of destiny. It draws on the hurt suffered by love and separation, in hopes that audiences can find solace in a series of hypotheticals.
What if we didn’t prioritize ourselves so much?
What if we had never moved away?
What if love did prevail?
Meant to Be
In-yeon, an age-old philosophy across Korean culture, as well as many Asian cultures, posits that every relationship or interpersonal interaction occurs as fated. It is not a coincidence or a miracle that you stumbled into the people in your life at the right time or place, but that it was all meant to happen as destiny wrote.
“It’s an inyeon if two strangers even walk past each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush, because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives.” — Past Lives (2023)
In the film, Nora and her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung personifies this as the pre-destined couple who meet at different parts of their lives. They check back with each other from their own sides of the globe, and look longingly at the lives they have built independently from one another.
When Hae Sung finally arrives in New York, an incredible 24 years since they last met in real-life, he is left in awe at the life Nora has built for herself as a writer and wife. Meanwhile, Nora continues to interrogate Hae Sung about his relationship with his girlfriend, and his engineering career in Asia.
Oddly enough, the script makes little effort to solidify any chemistry between the two main leads, instead relying on the audience to fill in the gaps with their own ill-fated romance.
It has important emotional beats — the longing stares, the inconvenient video calls, the social media stalk — but the two characters are so lacking in personality and chemistry that it feels difficult to buy into their relationship as being one worth a lifetime of regret.
Past Lives relies too heavily on this narrative, offering audiences comfort in a hypothetical reality where we can make amends with those we have lost, and suggests that we may somehow learn to accept these fates in this lifetime so that we may hope for better in the next.
So It’s Not Meant to Be?
After having accepted the impracticalities of a long-distance relationship, Nora quickly finds love closer to home. At her writers’ retreat, she runs into Arthur, a fellow writer living down the hall from her.
Fast-foward another twelve years and a marriage later, Arthur worries that their relationship was one of chance and not of true love. That they were only together because it was convenient and practical of them to do so — to move in together, to marry for Nora’s visa, and to write professionally.
In what is perhaps the film’s most compelling sequence, Arthur confesses that he feels undeserving of Nora, and that their “boring love story” has no romance to match her star-crossed childhood lover.
In an effort to be a bigger part of her world, which is arguably one of the most grand displays of affection, Arthur learns Korean to better engage with her culture and family heritage. But this is only to be dismissed by Nora, and maybe even the screenwriter herself, who shrugs it off as being annoying.
Arthur’s role in the narrative as an antagonist to “true love” cements why Past Lives portrays an unhealthy obsession with destiny and fate. It continues to romanticize the what-if’s and regrets of our past, all while failing to recognize that which we already have in this lifetime.
As with most things in life, love is not necessarily about destiny or fate, it is not “written in the stars”, and there is almost certainly no evidence for the existence of soulmates.
We are born into this world through a series of unlikely probabilities, in a community of family and friends met through coincidence, and we take active steps to develop those relationships with the people around us.
In fact, it is nearly a statistical impossibility that our soulmate, across the billions of people on Earth (and maybe infinitely more across the galaxy) just so happens to be in the same class as us, or lives on our street, or uses the same dating apps as us.
Making an Effort
Instead of giving up our control and romanticizing fate, we might perhaps be better off taking an active approach to how we view our relationships. That they are not necessarily something destined to happen, but something that we need to work on and appreciate.
There is nothing more romantic, nothing more grand a gesture in love, than to acknowledge the difficulties standing in each other’s way and to chart a course together to work things out.
