On 'Past Lives', fate and what could have been

An extended journal entry from the night I watched it

July 4th, 2023 (contains spoilers)
Just got home from watching Past Lives just now. It’s 12:49am and I still feel like I’m processing it. The film is centred around Na Young, a woman who immigrated from Korea to Toronto when she was 12 years old and is virtually reunited with her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung 12 years later for a few months, then physically reunited with him when he visits her as a married woman in New York.

To her, Hae Sung represents an entirely different life and an entirely different version of who she could have been. He acts as a point of interrogation for Nora, but it’s so much more than that. They form a sweet and gentle relationship of their own over Skype in the months they chat virtually. They’re giddy by each other’s company, and comforted by the familiarity they bring to each other in their mid 20s. The lengthy calls and innocent banter remind them that the world they shared in their childhood was real. That in some small way, that joy and innocence can be accessed again through each other. After feeling split between a potential life with a seemingly impossible long distance relationship with Hae Sung, Nora eventually suggests that they take a short break from talking. Clinging to their childhood is distracting each them from the lives that are right in front of them.

Little do they know it would be another 12 years before they speak again. This time, they do it face-to-face when Hae Sung visits Nora in New York after a break up. There’s something so simple and tender about their conversations. They’re mostly gentle with their words, which are occasionally soured by their unspoken jealousies for having lived such different lives independent of the other on opposite sides of the world.

They have a conversation at a bar, grappling with what they might’ve meant to each other in previous lives and what they should mean to each other in this one. It’s a silly but painful exercise in imagination. Nora has a full, loving life with her kind and surprisingly understanding husband Arthur—who sits quietly next to them at the bar while they converse with each other in Korean. There’s a quiet simmering in Arthur, he feels helpless. He’s shaken, but assured in his steady love for Nora. She makes his world bigger, he says. He wonders if he does the same for her. If he’ll ever be able to.

In-yun, fate, providence. A tie or bond that is layered and extends across lifetimes. A beautiful, humbling and shattering thought.

In the final scenes of the film, Nora walks Hae Sung to his Uber down the street. Nora and Hae Sung gaze at each other for their final few moments. It seems as though the tension could shatter away into a passionate, decisive embrace. But, as they discussed earlier, it just wasn’t meant to be. Their fates weren’t meant to align that way. Not in this lifetime, at least.

I keep thinking about what Hae Sung says to Nora before he gets in the car. Her asks her, if the life they are living now is already the precursor to another one. What then, might they be saying to each other in their future lives? What do they mean to each other there? It would be the romantic thing for her to say that they would be united as soulmates in their next lives.

But, of course Nora doesn’t say that. She says the true thing.

“I don’t know.”

That’s the thing about fate, right? We don’t get to decide it. We don’t get to determine it, it’s not our place. We just live and hope things will turn out right. That it’ll all make sense in the end. Throughout it all we hope and pray that we get the fate we need, the fate we deserve. We spend decades trying to accept all that was lost and left behind was for some big cosmic reason. We sift through our lives still in progress trying to make sense of it.

After Nora watches Hae Sung leave, along with her last chance of choosing her past life with him, she breaks down as she walks back to her apartment. Arthur waits at their building steps, already bracing for her fall. He puts his insecurities aside, because he understands what Nora is going through.

The film could so easily feel tired in Nora’s dilemma between two men, her real confusion comes with the lives she could have lived, the person she could have and inevitably did become. We all have countless moments like that in our own lives. I think about mine a lot. If I had reconnected with that one person, if we left each other’s lives sooner. I joke to myself that I couldn’t change the path I’m on even if I tried—it’s a canon event.

But without those people actually in front of me, like Hae Sung and Nora being reunited, the imagining feels less grating and more hopeful. Exploring these little hypotheticals gives me somewhere to learn, to reflect, to imagine the kind of life I want to live, the kind of person I hope to be. And maybe all my misgivings and mistakes, my decisions to be the person that leaves to some and the person that stays to others are a part of my own in-yun. Here’s hoping.