‘Past Lives’, Inyeon and ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’
In her directorial debut, Celine Song delivered one of the most heartbreaking works in cinema history. Past Lives is a phenomenal film that tugs at the heartstrings throughout with a patiently devised narrative, beautiful cinematography, and a glorious score.
Song’s movie, starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro, is a romantic drama that explores what might have been. Past Lives delves into the narrative of what could unful if specific critical events in history were altered by the slings and arrows of time and fortune.
Na Young and Hae Sung, two young classmates in South Korea, develop the kind of juvenile and eternally memorable attraction to one another that often informs the rest of our romantic lives. However, Na Young suddenly emigrates to Canada with her family and changes her name to Nora. Hae Sung is admittedly upset, but like any 12-year-old boy, he quickly gets over it.
Or so it seems. Some 12 years later, the two make contact via Facebook and begin an online, long-distance relationship. However, eventually, Nora cuts off contact with her old friend as she wants to focus on her writing in New York, and shortly after that, she meets her future husband, Arthur, at a writing retreat.
Another 12 years pass in the flash of an eye. Nora is married to Arthur, who knows of her strange past relationship with Hae Sung. Sung is planning to visit Nora in New York, and Arthur wonders whether he is standing in the way of a relationship that was always destined to happen if it weren’t for strange twists of fate such as Nora’s emigration, her dedication to her writing, and Hae Sung’s compulsory military service in South Korea.
So, the film plays with the central premise of what might have been. Through Nora, Song explained the Korean notion of inyeon, which means “providence or fate in a given relationship”. She certainly has inyeon with Sung, but she equally has it with her husband, Arthur. While the concept, influenced no doubt by Buddhism, is at the core of Past Lives, the film also looks to have flecks of the Argentine short story writer Jorge Luis Borges and his 1941 story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’.
Borges’ story attempts to explain the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics through literary means. The actual narrative of the story is incredibly difficult to explain – as is often the case with Borges’ works – but it is a spy story that posits that many paths to the same outcome are possible and that the truth is not necessarily linear in nature.
In that light, Past Lives appears to do the same thing, although it arrives in a far more emotional manner. There’s an anxiety in each of Nora, Hae Sung and Arthur regarding a truth that none of them are willing to accept: Nora and Hae Sung are destined to be together. Hae Sung is quiet in his approach to this belief, whereas we can see that Nora holds serious doubt as to whether she ought to be married to Arthur at all.
Meanwhile, Arthur displays the sense of being of an ideal husband in how he understands his wife’s worry. After all, Hae Sung has been, however distant at times, part of Nora’s life for over 20 years and, as a writer, wonders whether he is disrupting the perfect love story. By the same reasoning, he questions if he is an essential part of the story as its antagonist.
But in the end, it comes down to that notion of inyeon once again, and all parties essentially agree in one way or another, and through many wet eyes, that Nora and Arthur share an unbreakable bond in this life. Nora and Hae Sung may have been lovers in a past life, and they may be so in a future existence.
So whether through the Korean concept or the Borgesian philosophy, Past Lives delves into the free will and determinism debate that undoubtedly impacts so many of our romantic endeavours, and it’s all issued in one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking narratives in cinema history. Quite simply, Song’s debut is something of a masterpiece.
