Arthur tells his wife Nora, who is from South Korea, that things could have turned out differently. Suppose that in that house where they both stayed as artists, there had been another nice man, not him, wouldn’t she be here in bed with that man? Nora responds realistically: it is not true, it turned out that she is now lying here with him.
You can say that the movie Past Lives by Celine Song is about the many unlived lives that lie behind everyone’s lives as possibilities and in a sense that is true. The childhood sweetheart that is met again can be a disappointment, but it can also light a flame that turns into a big fire. Or neither, as in this film. There is longing, homesickness and a bit of regret, but there is also the realistic insight that this is the way it is now and that there is no reason to regard that as a mistake and the life not lived as it ‘actually’ meant to be.
The theme of the film is not only unrealized possibilities, but also the coincidences that lead to what does happen, which are no more or less random. The man you are with now could perhaps have been another man, yes, if chance, fate, providence had made things happen differently, but the fact is that it is this man and you are happy now with this one. Now that it has become this way, he can no longer just as well be someone else. That was only possible at a point in the past that only became a clear point in retrospect because you just met this man and then something developed between you.
Everything meaningful can only be seen in retrospect. But it is also there if you don’t see it yet, the film says, a story does not have to arise immediately for all kinds of small events to be meaningful. This is called the Korean concept In Yun.
It is strongly reminiscent of a poem by Borges, in fact of many poems by Borges, in which everything that happens, from “the freshness of the water in Adam’s throat” to “the innumerable dust that was armies” and “the forming the cloud in the desert,” was necessary “to bring our hands together.” And that is of course true, once something has happened it has become inescapable and everything has led to it, because nothing can be undone. That does not mean that everything can be justified by pointing to events in the past.
It is as the wise Nora says: “I ended up here.” And not anywhere else. “To me you are the girl who left,” says her Korean childhood sweetheart, “to your husband you are the woman who stays.”
That husband hears his wife speaking Korean in her sleep. He always found that especially sweet, but now that his childhood sweetheart has come to visit, he finds it somewhat uncomfortable, now he realizes that there is a place in her that he cannot reach.
This undoubtedly applies more to immigrants, but of course it always applies. Besides the fact that someone else cannot be known anyway, there is also always that unknowable place of ‘before my time’, a place where a childhood sweetheart, for example, does know the way.
That place is easily also a place of loss – the past is not just joyfully overcome and left behind. But that’s okay. You are here now.
A version of this article also appeared in the October 16, 2023 newspaper.