Past Lives: Futuristic nostalgia

“It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.”― Mark Twain

-If it is meant to be, it will be.

+Even if it is meant to, is it really supposed to?

-Let your love go, if its yours it will come back.

+Does love come back, or is it just nostalgic future?

-Right person wrong time.

+Can't right and wrong coexist, in one time and one person?

The human love experience, so commonly unique that it disturbs, almost disgusts me how many individuals share stories of the all so similar people, all so similar cliche endings, all so similar reconciliations. I have spent my teenage years trying to build an idea of love myself, so that I would not be taken out by a big wave of emotion once I come out of my isolated dream chamber. How to save yourself from the big crisis, how to never make the mistakes done before by your mother, unmet strangers on social media comments, your favourite woman writers? The tricky part comes here; although human love experience can be explained, can be told, can be scripted, can be advised upon, it can never be diminished or not lived, even when it is un-lived.

Past Lives talks from the perspectives of un-lived, unexperienced, un-happened, un-done; it talks from the perspective of a big what if and what is and what should. Everything nostalgic of a finished love story, every good retrospective look told from the eyes of a past that does not exist, a past that is only an unreachable future. This movie is a reminiscent of Linklater, Wong Kar-Wai, La La Land, even Casablanca; a tribute to all that happens in love even when we want to protect ourselves from getting hurt. It tells us the story from other side of Eden, talks about how something that has never happened is just ike everything that happens coincidentally and ends tragically. It tackles all the love stories that leave a big sense of loneliness and longing and it achieves this from showing the fullness of nothingness.

I want to shape this review as personal journal pages of the 3 characters: Nora, Hae-Sung and Arthur. I want to approach it with delicacy and show that Celine Sung is a grand storyteller who masterfully depicted that something that never really happened can be as painful as something left half; that all love stories are same in their essence. That love is not a feeling, or a rush; it is a choice of reminiscing past, breaking present, sailing future.

ALERT: It is highly advised for you to watch the movie before looking into this review. You can never re-meet something if you do not have in-yun with it. You will understand what I mean.

Love is presence, but who am I to decide?

Entry by Arthur

Oh that night, the hot summer night where I met Nora and she talked about this concept of In-yun and things beyond my understanding giving me the breezy sense that I would spend the rest of my dull life trying to solve her unreachable sides. Now I look back and see what a romantic I was, a writer in all senses and I almost feel stupid to think that I can provide her the way she added full to my dull.

Yesterday I met Hae-Sung, the Korean ex childhood sweetheart. I said many things to Nora after she mentioned he was coming, maybe I was even too open that night? I did not even properly know this guy and he just seemed like this threat; this threat I was absolutely unarmored for with my English, funny hair, and this threat who had a potential key into Nora's undiscovered side by me. Now my thoughts are less intense, especially after Nora came into my arms and cried after he left our town, her town, forever. They are replaced by feelings and subtlety. But tell me, what is a writer without thoughts?

Theirs is a book, a screenplay, something made for the movies. What I have with Nora is a life, a simple American writer meeting an extraordinary Korean woman and getting married early to provide her with citizenship? I do provide her you know; physically, emotionally, mentally. On all -llys I am a provider but I am not and never will be the breaths between conversations, the laughter between accidental touches, the flickering excitement, the moving wave, the in-yun.

Hae-Sung is a great guy, a guy of utmost respect and manners, a proper Korean man who is constantly improving himself. I can get this impression even from his firm, steady, undoubtful handshake. But he is like this pill in Nora's hand, or was. It was as if she is almost always so close to taking that pill and a new Nora would emerge out of that; the Nora I am listening to at nights in her dreams, the little girl in a Korean school uniform, the free Nora, Na Young. She never took the pill, maybe just tasted it in the year they spent face-timing each other, maybe crashed it under the wheels of the taxi that took Hae-Sung forever.

Na Young and Hae-Sung; what a great rhyme, for a never ending never real time... Anyone reading this would think what an insecure piece of a man, he writes these fanatical thoughts of his wife being with her childhood sweetheart; what a weak-ass. Maybe I am that weak person, a weak American dreamer stuck in the middle of a love affair that was supposed to happen in all other universes created by superior forces. I am that weak person who laughs in bed with his wife knowing she belongs to someone, some place else in her mind. A weakling, someone who is so afraid yet so accepting of a future that does not include the love of his life, just so she can find freedom and he can continue into his gray boredom with occasional writings and writers retreats.

The bar we sat at, the stool that engulfed me as I watched Nora and Hae-Sung get lost in their in-yun, glimpses of the words from a language I am trying to learn to get to know my wife better; and then those glimpses were painting a picturesque sky in between their eyes. And there I was looking at the way how this woman, beautiful Nora of foreign dreams was looking into this other world she might have belonged in if I was not sitting right next to her. When Hae-Sung told me more about in-yun and how I must have thousands of layers of in-yun with my Nora, I remembered how she told me when we met it was nothing about in-yun with us. I could have been offended but I guess I chose not to. She is a lot of things I can never live up to, but I would rather be curiously weak with her than ordinarily strong by myself forever. A thousand in-yuns, a firefly in between writers' conversations, half-successfully learning Korean snippets, watching her face get lost into thousand pieces I am devoting my life to discover. Nora Moon, you are everything.

In yun and beyond, do I belong?

Entry by Hae-Sung

Na-Young, I still see you as the braided girl who held my hand and slept on my shoulder on our first and last date in middle school. I spent my lifetime asking the wrong questions; all starting with what ifs. The right answers came too late, and I left your town together with them.

It feels like I was always more involved somehow, I was someone who was willing to stand by you. Right now I realize I did not only want to stand by you but I also wanted you to stay with me. Yet the reason I was under the effect of thousand layers of emotions was because of the way you were, a person who is just free spirited; in Korean culture as someone who leaves as I told you that night. It's a curse, to love someone for the way they are and not be together with them because the moment that togetherness starts that person you love for themselves will not be themselves anymore. I might be romanticising it with these words, maybe I will never be brave enough to accept love as a choice more than thoughts and feelings but I guess this is the right way because every life event we lived led to this one last separation.

When you contacted me via FaceBook, I was excited but beyond that confused. I thought that I would spend an entire lifetime searching for you hopelessly and that was the aim for me. You broke that with contacting me, and that triggered something more : maybe it can work, maybe both her freedom and my love can coexist in the same universe? Then after a year of watching your face glow from the computer screen, you ended everything with an open end; just like you did when you walked your way home up the stairs for the last time after I saw you in the street. I could not be mad at you, I was just sitting there broken for years thinking about all the what ifs again. It was when I came to New York that I finally got my right answers for my wrong questions.

From the moment you hugged me in the park till the time my taxi arrived, I let myself live through the what ifs I formed over the years. What if I was here and we were sharing this intimate bond? What if you did not have anyone in your life and this meet up in your city led to us as a whole? What if there was more to our story than my years of hopeless hoping, magical reunion and eventual end? I thought to myself, it would have been nice if you could have been the one. And that was the exact reason why I had to accept that this was the life we had, although we might have been in each other's arms in million more lifetimes. This was your life with your husband, a calm and steady man who loves you even with the mere look in his eyes. And I was a distant memory for you, a path you did not take and will never take. The reason why we were never meant to be was because we were meant to be in million different past lives before us. My torture is to live with this reality forever, a curse. Maybe my new connections will never be as natural as the one I had with you but that will make it even better: just like you built your in-yun with Arthur together and you are bound by many layers, I will build mine. My inspiration will always be our connection and how you stood in the dark when we were waiting for my taxi.

In the name of identity, who defines me? Entry by Nora

Little girl of big dreams, grown woman of questions and a never ending tale of aching sense of self. I do not know how to start this journal entry let alone how to think in general. In a sense, I always wanted to belong. In another, I would never be me if I ever belonged. Life did not come linear to me and I did not approach it linearly either. I brought my past with me in every story I wrote but I left everything behind all times as I opened a blank page. I am still just any other child of an educated immigrant Korean family in this giant maze of a country, I am still unknown, undiscovered, uncovered. Lost in every sense, aspiring story for many; a pile of unidentified identities for myself. In this sense of self-less-ness, how did I get polarized into a culturally dilemmatic love triangle?

I have or had a friend, Hae-Sung when I was a little girl. He was my academic rival, my first date, my reconnection, my never-full, never-ending, never-lived great love. I remember our date even now, a core memory one might say. Our moms having their own friend date together as we discovered the very pureness of first love; free of fear, free of expectations, free of hope. Unbothered, untouched breeze of connection, nothing fancy or necessary; just two kids falling asleep in the backseat. And I left him there, at the bottom of the stairs; left this memory I thought but I left something much bigger: a heart full of me, in half. When I decided to put those halves together, looking forward to each call, each sentence, each laugh each day; I started to feel it deep inside me that I was in fact somewhere between the line of belong-land and fly-free-sky. And I was paralyzed hung by a single cloud of identity in the sky, I wanted him to come and be a cloud with me, raining as we go. But he gazed at me instead, with affection, with only the best intentions and I stayed hung; I ended it one more time, my ticket to belong-land expired in that one last Skype call.

When I met Arthur, I was at a silent place. The idea of Korea was fading away from me slowly. I was discovering belong-land in America. He was this smart and witty American man, no one complicated or twisted; a few fireflies, a good conversation, a distraction, a retreat. After spending my youth silently fighting for identity he was a peace of a missing piece, a ticket to a new belong-land. And we started living this life; simple, calm, away from trouble of unanswered questions in my head. I had nothing missing, but how can one know they are not missing something they never had?

When Hae-Sung came into my city, I was flooded by everything that never happened and that I left hanging to the cloud in his sky. From my conversation with Arthur about him to the way light reflected from his taxi, Hae-Sung brought and took a lot from me. He brought me my Korean identity that I thought I had to leave behind to realize myself. He took my real friend and unlived love story from me in the glimpse of an eye. Throughout his visit and me guiding him through the city, I had my roots in my bag, in front of my eyes as I was taking each step in my current life. And the bar, the bar was inexplicably overwhelming yet freeing for not only Nora but also for Na-Young. As I set there in between the men representing the duality of my identity I came into the realization of me being neither. I was not an American writer achieving bigs with her supportive husband, but I was not a Korean girl in love with her proper Korean lover either. I was Nora, I was Na-Young, I was an inheritant of this world; a meshwork of nationalities, a puzzle of emotions, the girl my parents raised, the woman that I raised. I fell in love with both men, in different dimensions. When it came to a decision, I made it in the way little Na-Young would want me to: I chose with curiosity, with aspiration and with all the life within me. I may never belong and I am glad I never will. As tears mixed with the splashes of the taxi that took Hae-Sung away, I lied my wet eyes into the chest of my husband; I was me that I chose to be.

The sorrow of unlived experiences and half-time loves: what is my take?

Entry by Julie

There is something poetic yet deadly about the way love stories that do not happen or left in half. A complete love story is packed with many and leaves word for few. Oh but a love story broken in half, a story that was never unwrapped tackle our minds forever. If you have ever lived something similar, I present my gratitude to you for being a member of human race, a premium card of human experience you have earned really. Love is a big battle and agreement of identity, and despite its greatness or power in our lives our identities move us along or away; creating unmeasurable sense of incompleteness with every choice. You want to run after, be embraced, be a romantic movie character but reality is and will never be about love; it will be about you and how you place yourself in every decision you make, even love.

This movie is a living proof that human love experience is of great value but human identity is indispensable. From the director's own braid to every stitch it touches in our minds, it is a testament to those who love big, move big, thing big and feel so small.

Cheers to the unglued identities and to un-lived love stories; it is a real mystery being human.

If you have found yourself in tears at the end and if you were also greatly moved by the movie like me,

here are our recommendations for you as a love and identity seeker: