Strike this bargain
I watched Past Lives in the mid morning at a cinema in the middle of last year. I'd just awkwardly broken up with someone when I went to grab some of my stuff from his flat. As in, I had driven from his flat to the cinema with a calico bag with some of my belongings in tow in the hatch of my car. It was one of those breakups where it had all but happened officially: I'd been checked out for a long time after being thoroughly disappointed for too long and really should have left a while ago, but he had a nice couch and was very good at making me laugh. Saying it out loud- “I’m happier when I’m not with you, but I wish you the best and I’ll miss you etc.”- felt like a formality. I believe it was like that for both of us based on his response.
So it was a good time to watch Past Lives. I adored this film. I’m a strong believer in the enjoyment of art being almost as much a matter of quality and taste as it is timing.
It might not be a surprise then that one of my favourite films of all time is In the Mood for Love. I first watched that when I was 19, as part of a film class that I was taking in art school. Our lecturer introduced it by saying it would change how we fell in love with the implication that the change would be a positive one. I mostly remember finding it very sexy despite the noticeable lack of sex scenes and nudity. But that’s a given considering it stars a 90s Tony Leung.
My lecturer and I got on well and he liked my art because, in his words, it was “sassy” and “funny”. That’s an accurate description. I had a secret goofy and anguished side that I often couldn’t speak about directly out of shyness, perceived propriety or simply an inability to do so. My anguish and goof spurted out in the form of visual art. Most of this took place in journals that I would cut, stick, scribble and write in. I was making when I could but not trying hard enough, struggling with depression I didn’t know I had. The existence of mood disorders in eldest daughters was neither understood nor acknowledged in our matriarchal immigrant family. My metaphorical dinghy had a pinhole leak and I thought it was normal despite my shoes being wet. Four years later the dinghy would be centimetres from the ocean floor, but that’s an anecdote for another time.
In Past Lives everything happens below the surface. Some people would find this film very boring as a result. Lying awake in their tiny apartment, novelist Arthur turns to his wife, fellow writer Nora. “I was just thinking about what a good story this is,” he says of the apparent love triangle not quite threatening his marriage – the reappearance of Hae Sung, Nora’s childhood sweetheart from Seoul, now a broad shouldered thirty something who’s come to New York for a week to catch up with her. As a general rule, screenwriters should avoid dialogue that sounds like it’s complimenting the script itself. But the characters in Past Lives are writers themselves - the very kind of people who go looking for “good stories” in the events of their own lives.
And Arthur is right. The saga of Nora and Hae Sung is a good, gentle story. There’s space to think about your own life. Spanning decades and continents, it gives you room to relate. That’s what moved me. Nora pores over messages she’s exchanged with her childhood love over Facebook. The laptop screen scrolls, the camera stays still. It rests on Noras face as she contemplates a communication from Hae Sung in silence, wondering how to respond. You think immediately of someone from your own past. The recognizable shudder of empathy moves through you. She remembers the person she was when she was with him; you think about the brand of thoughtless bitch you sometimes were with an ex. There’s tension, but it’s all unspoken. No dramatic knock down drag out fights here. Any messy emotions that might kill its dreamy vibe or roughen the road to a philosophical conclusion are smoothed out. I watched it with the understanding that for Nora, Hae Sung is more of an allegory of her cultural displacement than an old lover. Her attraction to him is a throb of nostalgia for the life she left behind when she left Korea.
In one of my favourite scenes Arthur stands in their kitchen, frowning, as he asks about Hae Sung. “Is he attractive? Are you attracted to him?”. It’s the most conflict you see in the film but these characters are seemingly good at communicating so there’s no struggle, no hiding. “When is he leaving again?” he asks, after a pause. This isn’t a laugh out loud film but the humour is all too recognizable. Who hasn’t felt that type of quiet jealousy?
It was about a year into trying my hand at visual art that I tacitly understood I might have been better off doing something reading and/or writing related. Painting and drawing were flash in the pan interests, but I’d been reading and keeping a journal since I had the ability to do both. I didn’t change courses for reasons that still slightly mystify me but probably had to do with laziness or my diminishing mental state. I was clawing through and the idea of change seemed like too much, so here we are now.
The past lives of Nora and Hae Sung are their childhoods, conserved and exalted in their memory and by modern communications: Skype, Facebook. These communications make up a section of another layer of reality that sits next to this one on the same plot, where each part of ourselves we’ve lost or left behind or exchanged for another (who can tell which is which?) still exists. The intersections where this reality permeates ours is when it feels most like a tale trying to resolve itself; sometimes that makes a good story.