Dreaming in different languages – Past Lives and my experience
This is not a film review as such, but potential light spoilers ahead.
Sometimes I wonder about the life I would have had if I hadn’t emigrated to the UK from South Africa. Around nine years old, my entire world changed, and I wonder if I’d have had the same interests, kept the same friends or even the same lifestyle. Many of us dream of living in warmer places, discovering new opportunities in different lands, being open to living a different life
Whether we like it or not, either by randomness or by God’s hand, we are the product of history, our environments and providence and what we end up accepting as our ‘home truths’, whether we like it or not. The friendships we have grown or let wither, the vocations we’ve turned down or accepted, or even discovering you’ll never be a morning person.
Past Lives (2023, d. Song) made me confront some of these big thoughts, as the film reflects on the concept of past and future. Can human bonds transcend all barriers of time and space? Or rather, can in-yeon, the serendipitous connection between people bonded by fate and destiny be casual? All great cinema and literature tends to pull the lens back onto yourself.
Disconnection
I felt a sense of profound love and loss when pondering the main themes of the film – the disconnection from your homeland, adopting a new identity, and the what-ifs that come along the way. As much as the characters are somewhat cyphers compared say to The Before Trilogy, it only means it has become something universal.
It’s a fantastic film that asks deep questions, whilst never getting in the way of the central plot:
Nora (Greta Lee) is a Korean Canadian woman in her thirties whose connection to a childhood friend survives her emigration from Seoul to Canada and then to New York, to unite them for just one weekend.
Being of European descent versus being Korean, it was easier for me to mask or adapt to the places I have lived in. I might have a Czech name (a part of a bigger, unexplored story about identity, no doubt) but I sound and act English, but then… in many ways, I cannot shake the feeling of being an outsider during my lower moments.
Wrestling with these questions of cultural identity is hard when identity is such a malleable and personal thing in the first place. In my own mind, I was a popular, happy-go-lucky sporty kid in South Africa, with a diverse group of friends. In England, I turned into someone more cautious, isolated. In time, I managed to grow out of my shell, more connected with the people around me, and over the years I’ve come to the grateful place I am in now. The question remains though, what person would have I been? Would I be sportier? What would have happened if I lived more authentically earlier?
Changing Contexts
Unlike the character of Na Young, who changed her name to Nora, I never had to change my name to better assimilate into society (though I flirted with shedding it to stomp out any theoretical xenophobia potentially affecting my life). In many ways, I’m privileged and was able to be comfortable as my name sounds Italian in casual conversation.
It’s easy for me to say I’m British or British South African. The term British has functioned as an umbrella for unified difference, and a similar concept exists in South Africa (though there are better writers out there who can speak about resistance and permutations of nationality, it’s complex). Yet sometimes it doesn’t feel like enough.
Looking back, I adapted and thrived in many ways to become what I am with maturity, God’s grace (or random luck), and the support of friends and family.
I’ve made England my home, and I am grateful. I’ve accepted that I’ll never be fully English, and I’ll never be fully South African, so I’ll just have to be me.
Looking over the horizon
It’s been a while since I’ve visited South Africa. There are some family members I have not seen in nearly twenty years when in the past I would have seen them every Christmas. I’m about to be going on a trip, fully aware that a part of me will be longing for something that doesn’t exist. Returning to a sunny Christmas in a country that exists only in my mind.
The distance between South Africa and the UK versus North America and Korea is starkly different, and it’s not as big a jump culturally or even in time zones. However, one can feel the film that director Celine Song created is universal.
Americanised yet still rooted in her Korean roots, Past Lives goes deep into the themes of disconnection, with Nora’s distance showing up in even the inadequacy of her spoken language, let alone what the passage of time does to your life and dreams. The film’s focus however is what-if questions both explicit and implicit, including if she’s connected to Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) romantically or rather to the idea of him.
Is it a type of strange ‘othering’ she is experiencing or rather, is it something we all indulge in when looking into each other lives? The film begins with a couple, faceless, commenting on the reunited friends and Nora’s husband Arthur (John Magaro). We break the fourth wall, entertaining our thoughts and feelings about the film before it happens, an exploration into the messiness of identity and possibilities.
Nora explains to Arthur at the midpoint of the film that when she met Hae, she felt both more American and yet also more Korean in his presence. For me, with the recent Rugby World Cup 2023 win for the Springboks, I definitely know how it feels to be both British and South African at the same time.
Speaking in tongues
The conversation continues, as Arthur admits to learning Korean not only to grow closer to Nora in the waking world but to understand what Nora is talking about in her sleep. Restricted by a language barrier, Arthur will never know that side of her. He will struggle to know her fullest dreams and nightmares. Sometimes the past lives we have lived will always be mysterious, and even without the language barrier, we will never fully understand and know the interior lives of our loved ones.
Whether it is about language or cultural history, I am slightly disconnected from my lineage (South African and Czech), and even at times, I think about the missing depth in the relationships I could have had, but also who I’m related to that still live in Czechia today. Nora doesn’t speak Korean except to her mother and Hae, and somehow her language is crystalised in that moment, progressing with age but never as a native Seoulite. I don’t even speak Afrikaans to even be able to dream of it (South Africa has over 11 languages and many South Africans do not speak Afrikaans either, just another facet of cultural disconnection).
In the film, Nora’s dream was to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, but as time wore on, she dreamt of winning a Pulitzer and then over ten years later a Tony award. It’s okay for goals to change, as life and its concerns take the front seat, as the past is true enough for us.
Past Lives flows between pregnant pauses between Nora and Hae, both of potential love, but Celine Song truly uses time as the best cinematic device to develop their emotional journey in time. Not just in literal terms as childhood sweethearts reconnect through Skype, but also in how their environments are shaping them and their experiences.
In the intervening years, at a rural writer’s retreat, Nora meets her future husband. Hae expands his world by going to Taipei, learn Chinese and meet a girl. Song’s magic is based on what she doesn’t show us, and what we put into the story ourselves. There’s no real silence when stories can exist within the gaps of conversation.
Be-Longing
People described the film’s ‘longing’ as Wong Kar-Wei-esque, but I feel it is more about the feeling, the hasty and unquantifiable that drifts in and out. To use a cliche, Walt Whitman said ‘I contain multitudes.’
We are not fixed into one place or one idea, but simple things can expand, grow and become different. Nora, speaking to Hae as they explore the more touristic side of the Hudson River, refers to her marriage to Arthur as two trees fighting for space in the same pot, sharing and co-existing even when the pot restricts at times.
Our sense of being is our past and our future existing in the present, both trees in our existence. We can regret things, but we should celebrate as well. It takes time to love yourself.
Til next time,
M.