Eight Thousand Layers of the Inyeon

I watched Past Lives on the flight home from Milan last night after a year or so of near misses. I’ve had a ticket to see it a few different times in theaters since its release and watched it floating in my streaming queue for months, and each time it’s popped up I’ve found a reason not to watch it for reasons that feel clearer to me now on the other side. It’s a reckonable but immense treatise on personal hermeneutics, allowing us as the audience to trace the implications of building an intentional life in someone else for a couple of hours and notice the ways in which our own hidden longings look to the characters on the screen to provide them an outlet or release. It’s at least modern, if not centrally human, to try to protect the little candles of our past unrequited loves from the occasional gusts of our current maturity, and the way Celine Song cups her hands here around the film’s relatable ache is both gorgeous and soothing. My favorite films are the ones which leave me feeling a bit less alone in the world and there were several moments here where I sensed Greta Lee’s character Nora looking directly at me.

On the other hand, there’s a large chunk of the film’s emotional heft that feels unknowable to an American man. I am probably the least Korean person alive on the Earth, and a healthy chunk of the tension here rests in Nora’s determination to assimilate abroad in an effort to realize her aspirations. In a flashback scene early on, she explains to her schoolmates that she’s moving to the US because Koreans don’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and this thread emerges a few more times throughout the course of the movie. One particularly poignant moment comes during a conversation with her Jewish American author husband, who is vulnerable enough to admit to her he feels a bit like the bad guy getting in the way of the destiny between Nora and her long lost interest Hae Sung. She responds by reminding him she chose this life with him in New York on purpose, and ends with a jokey question to him of whether he thinks she’d ever let someone get in the way of her rehearsals.

The relatable part here for any of us is the strain which the emotional momentum of something that used to feel like fate can put on the concrete realities of our present self and the life we know that we want. The walled-off portion is the experience of those things in the midst of the Korean diaspora, and I was grateful for the empathetic and unsure figure Nora’s American husband cuts at the late night bar near the end of the film while Nora and Hae speak in Korean about the concept of 인연 (inyeon) as they search for their footing with each other and their present lives. It’s a deeply Korean Buddhist concept (from what I can tell) meant to explain the connection between two people over the course of many lifetimes, and during the film they discuss the various forms of it. At its most complex, it seems to suggest that anyone we meet, even if it’s on the street for a moment, is someone we’ve interacted with before in a past life. These interactions can then compound in the cycle of reincarnation, and if two people are married in a given life it’s because they’ve had eight thousand meetings across eight thousand other lifetimes. Or something to that effect. I obviously have no idea what’s going on in the universe and I won’t try to imply I have any sort of deeper understanding of that concept, but it’s a beautiful thing to think about and in the scene described above it adds a teaspoon of levity-infused wisdom to a lifetime of longing.

And in many ways that’s where this film settled out for me. A guide to letting the grief of our own unresolved longings be acknowledged and released back into the wilderness of the world as it actually is. And if I learned anything from it, it’s that a life well-lived not just requires but fundamentally implies numerous moments of sobbing into the shoulder of our current selves/partners/friends/etc. That the beauty we choose to create always costs us something, sure, but that we often misplace the emphasis in the equation on the cost rather than the reward. As Nora’s mother puts it early in the film in what I would argue is a much healthier bouquet of the truth, “If you leave something behind, you gain something, too.”