Past Lives
And the difference between should have been and what could have been; *contains details about the new A24 film, Past Lives
I’ve been lingering on tarot readings a little too long and now my TikTok algorithm has learnt that I am someone who wants to be told what I want to hear. Someone is thinking of you, love will enter your life quickly, be patient a change is coming. In other words: comfort.
My relationship with kismet is fickle yet longstanding. Meant to be is not a statement I turn to, but things will work out – etched in thick, dark ink on my left forearm – is one I subscribe to, even if the ‘will’ takes me far into the future.
The thought of some preordained future written in the stars is too irresistible not to believe in; yet it is so easy to become cynical and disregard this blind optimism when things don’t work out the way you hoped. A not-so-chance encounter with someone from a past life had me reinterpreting our relationship; shape-shifting our decade-long narrative and twisting it into a neat little package that felt pleasing. An attempt to right the wrongs or tie up loose ends. It felt like someone less messy, more self-aware, older, perhaps a little wiser (me) attempting to meet an immovable intensity, intimacy and sense of thrill that otherwise has not changed (him).
I had barely considered the difference between what could have been with what should have been. The two words seemed so interchangeable, the agents of blind faith, providence and fate. Yet they are more binary than I cared to realised, and I had been leaning into one (should) and berating myself for the absence, rarely acknowledging the presence of something else. Should suggests something definite – the absence of something a true loss. Could feels softer: one of many roads, no better, no worse, just different, all leading to the same eventuality.
In Celine Song’s film, Past Lives, she deftly explores the liminal space between what could and what should have been through two childhood sweethearts who are separated by a sudden move from South Korea to Canada.
Na Young, a tenacious, thoughtful pre-teen moves emigrates to Canada with her family, leaving behind her sensitive, reticent crush Hae Sung. They lose touch over the years and it’s not until her mid-twenties when Na Young (now Nora) discovers that Hae Sung has been looking for her on Facebook that they reconnect. Both single but living on the other side of the world (Hae Sung still in South Korea, Nora in New York), they embark on a long-distance situationship that feels rooted in their past life of knowing each other and tied to their mother tongue.
After months of Skyping, texting and talking on the phone, Nora calls it quits when she realises neither of them will prioritise seeing one other in person. A few days later, she heads upstate to a writer’s retreat where she meets Arthur and tells him about the Korean concept of in-yun – how fate brings two people together based on countless connections in their previous lives. Eventually, after Arthur and Nora are married, Hae Sung reconnects with Nora and they meet up in New York. He meets Arthur and the last part of the film explores this strange, undefined, at times fraught relationship between the three, marred by time, distance, language barriers and in-yun.
What struck me about how Song portrays this relationship, is that it felt like Nora was so aware that although it could have been perfect (what if she stayed in Korea, what if they made the effort to see each other in their early twenties, what if she left her husband for him?), it wasn’t necessarily a missed opportunity that led her down the wrong path. Instead it was one of many choices she made. In fact, it’s her husband, Arthur, who seems more unsure about her decision.
“What a good story this is,” he says. “Childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later and realise they were meant for each other. In the story I’d be the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny.”
But in her mind, her life is not a story. Her life is a series of choices, and she chose to marry this man. I admire her reasoning here. To not be swept up in the romanticised, intangible, illusory fairy tale that we all make up in our heads when something is presented to us. It’s a way of looking back without being enveloped in nostalgia; to appreciate a past life, to understand how it moved you in ways you could not have been moved without it, to miss someone or something without desperately longing for it back; to grow without being held back by something that pre-dates reality.
“In-yun is basically about how you can’t control who walks into your life and who stays in your life,” says writer and director Celine Song. “That to me is at the heart of the film. It’s about the ineffable thing about every relationship, even the person who brushes up against you, even you and me who’s sitting here.”
It’s easy to romanticise what might have been. Without the tangible reality of it, that imagined future can take any shape. Crushes become partners, the hazy undefined edges of your intimacy shape-shift into idealistic scenes that cannot be penetrated. There is something undeniably wonderful about these little worlds that we conjure up in our minds. But stay here too long and the ‘what could have been’ starts to morph into a ‘what should have been’. Idealism slips into bitterness and you stop being able to see the wood for the trees. Likewise, the recurrence of a past life can make you feel like kismet has reached out for you once again, clouding your judgement by offering the shade of familiarity, but at a cost.
I remind myself of this over a bowl of piping hot soup dumplings. I am too prone to fantasy and must be jolted back to reality with the sharp kick of a chilli flake or the searing heat of just-escaped soup. It’s a difficult habit to kick, especially as the sky turns grey, the soft light inside collides with some cinematic track that allows my mind to drift and wander into dangerous territory.
The thing about in-yun is that I truly believe it: there are all of these layers of connection between people that suggest some level of pre-destiny. But we cannot constantly live inside of in-yun; instead it’s something we can take comfort in the knowledge that the brush of two hands on a street, or the collision of two souls that worked if just for a moment means that there is such a thing as universal feeling – an inter-connectedness that reminds us that we’re not alone.
