Your Life is Not a Dress Rehearsal
A newsletter in which I try and talk about the perfect film without giving any spoilers
Rituals evoke memory and nostalgia - they can transport us home, to a time period, to feelings of belonging, to meaning, to safety. For me, like Eid phone calls, seeing a movie on or in the days following Eid is a vestige from my childhood that makes Eid feel like a celebration.
My film this Eid was Past Lives and it was perfect. The opening shot of the film is of three people in a restaurant and the voice of an onlooker trying to determine the relationship between them. The film then goes back 24 years to introduce us to two childhood friends named Na Young and Hae Sung. Na Young becomes Nora Moon when her family moves from Seoul to Toronto and when Na Young moves, the two friends do not keep in touch.
This film is an exploration of love that accompanies different life stages: the love of children who are experiencing being seen and liked by another person for the first time, the love when who you are becoming is unfolding, the love that is anchored by years of shared witnessing, care and responsibilities. It’s a bittersweet, tender, joyful story where the locations function as additional characters. It made me ache but I loved it.
The film asks: Why and how do our most important people become part of our lives? One answer to that question is that our companions are our soulmates, our kindred spirits, loves we are drawn to through a strong magnetic pull. This the answer of chemistry, meet-cutes, dramatic airport interventions, continental migrations, dashes at the altar, inseparable Montagues and Capulets.
Sometimes a strong magnetic pull however, means shifting one’s life path. There is a moment in the film when Nora is choosing between committing to her life fully by focusing solely on the here and now or splitting her attention through waiting. If migration is part of your family’s story, you know this waiting and this split. This split happens through doing timezone math to schedule calls, in scanning for cheaper flights, in reflex responses to the sound of Gchat messages, in the frustration of dropped connections and grainy video calls, in staying indoors on sunny days to talk.
In this film, the idea that our loves are our soulmates is explored alongside other possibilities. A different possibility is the Korean idea of in-yeon, where anyone you meet in your life, even if that meeting is simply your clothes brushing against each other on the street means that there was a connection between you in a past life. To sustain a life connection then, those who are our life companions are people with whom we have layers upon layers - 8000 layers to be precise, of connection or in-yeon. This is the answer of fate, or taqdeer, of kismet. Of it being written. In the Islamic tradition for example, there is the idea that people you are close to or not close to are souls who you were physically close or far from at the time and place where all souls were created.
Another possibility the film offers is that so much of love, friendship, connection is about who fits in your life, and is compatible with what you want for yourself and your own vision of your life. Perhaps, the film asks, companionship is not about essential nature, but rather a somewhat arbitrary choice that develops into a shared life the more you invest into it and the more you build together. This version of love is shaped by one’s beliefs about their responsibility to themselves and their commitment to their dreams, hopes and aspirations. This is the answer of stability, of purpose, of self-love, of a relationship being an important but not organizing principle of one’s life.
In one of my favourite scenes, there is a conversation about partnership in which one person is essentially asking: Why me? Couldn’t you have ended up with anyone who was in your life path at the right time and place? In response, the answer is neither yes or no, but simply that “I am here because this is where I ended up.” This is my life because this is what I have built in other words. The narrative is less important than the material reality of their shared life.
This film does not favour one definition of love over another or any specific pairing. It suggests instead that any two people will love each other uniquely. The people who know and love us know different versions of us depending on when, where and for how long they knew us because who we are changes depending on context. There is a version of us that can only live and be known by others with whom we share cultural ties for example, people with whom we can share language, ritual, culture, memories. There is a version of us that can only live with those with whom we can live our dreams. We cannot have everything, and what we choose is shaped by what matters most to us and our expectations and hopes of ourselves and of our lives.
Have you seen this film? I’d love to hear your thoughts and/or what else you’ve been watching/reading this summer.