Note: While
living in the US, and posting here more sporadically, I started a series of
posts titled “Series & Films about/for Grief.” This is an addition to that
series, but I decided to shorten the title as we can just as well include books
and songs under this theme.
Warning: Don’t
read if you don’t want any spoilers about Past Lives.
Earlier this
month, I moved from one side of Amagerbrogade to another; I still have
the same bus and metro stops and can walk from my old apartment to the new one
in an almost straight line in ~5mins. This was in drastic contrast to my
previous move, which was overseas and included a change of job and country. If
I don’t count my childhood (that move was orchestrated by my parents) and the
short-term work relocations (2-3 months internships & research visits), I
now moved within the same city the same number of times as I moved across
countries. I kept thinking about and comparing the different moves in my life throughout
the month, and one thing that kept popping up in my mind was the final scene of
Past Lives.
Past Lives is Celine Song’s first feature film and inspired by her own life. It
follows Nora, who first emigrates to Canada from South Korea as a kid with her
family and then emigrates to USA from Canada as a young adult. During the first
emigration, Nora leaves behind her close childhood friend Hae Sung. Their lives
reconnect when they start to have regular video calls with each other when Nora
is in the US. After a while Nora decides to stop the video calls as she wants
to focus on her life in the US rather than holding onto her past life. Years
later, they meet again in New York. Nora is now married to an American, Arthur,
but the deep connection between Nora and Hae Sung is still there.
Based on Nora
and Hae Sung’s interactions, the natural thing to contemplate on, as Arthur
does, is if Nora and Hae Sung are meant to be together. Is Arthur only the
green-card-husband, while Hae Sung is the real romantic love story that should
have happened instead? In parallel, the film introduces inyeon, a
concept that is about fate and relationships between people and how one’s relationships
from past lives influence the relationships at the present.
In the final
scene, after Nora and Hae Sung separate from each other one more time, Nora
breaks down into tears. Arthur comes and holds her as they go back to their
apartment.
At the movie
theater, I was in Grand and alone
(+ the audience), I broke down together with Nora. I broke down not because of
a “could have been love story”, but because of all the grief I carry due to the
lives I left behind and the fatigue I accumulated due to the lives I had to
rebuild. I thought that is exactly why Nora cries in that final scene, not
because she prefers a life with Hae Sung over a life with Arthur.
Nora was born Na
Young. She changed her name to Nora after moving to Canada. What was that like
to be called something else and to look different from most other kids all of a
sudden? What else did she (have to) let go of in addition to her name? What parts
of her past life did she insist on keeping instead? What was the cost of that
insistence? Why did she move to USA? …
In an older post,
I referred to my decision to move to Denmark from USA quoting Cheryl Strayed’s
“Be brave enough to break your own heart.” The implications of moving to a
different country, being an expat, emigration … is almost violent even if you
do the move willingly.
Before I
conclude, I want to mention two more things that I really appreciate about Past
Lives that have nothing to do with grief.
First, in a
world that is full of romantic comedies that I cannot relate to, I appreciate
Celine Song for showing a loving relationship that ends up in a Green Card
marriage. The trigger for the marriages of most close friends of mine were
residence permit matters; one spouse holding the kind of passport that allows
the other to stay in the country. This doesn’t mean that these marriages aren’t
based on love.
Second, Past Lives features maybe the most tender scene I have ever watched between two straight adult male characters. It is the scene Arthur and Hae Sung meet for the first time, both in love with the same woman, making their best effort to speak to each other using the other’s native language, being the complete opposite of an alpha male. I don’t know if this was the same in real life for Celine Song, but I appreciate her for writing this beautiful scene.
