Readers Write In #867: Of Past Lives and Providence

By Karthik Amarnath

My wife and met through an arranged marriage. Ours was a modern version, where the arranged part was like a “first date.” Although it’s been fifteen years, I still remember the nerves from that evening. I was wearing a black shirt with silver streaks, sleeves folded up to the elbows, collars crisp and straight like a sentinel standing guard. This was a pre social media tryst, so all we had were some basic facts and flattering photos of the other person— and supposedly well-aligned planetary positions at the times of our birth. It was like one of those blind setups in movies— two strangers, at a dimly lit restaurant, seated beside deep orange walls, making conversation amidst clinking cutlery. My nerves were visible. I was constantly rustling my hair and fiddling my goatee. I also kept switching languages— an attempt to fake confidence— but every word I spoke was giving away the act.

A first date is like an air battle. All your antennae are tuned in, you’re searching for signals, reading the signs. Like a pilot in stealth, you’re swerving from subject to subject— movies, college, music, cousins, religious rituals, Rajnikanth, looping the socio-cultural landscape, like it were a casual sortie. This can take a while. I felt sorry for our waiter who came around every thirty minutes or so under the pretense of refilling our water glasses. He would mutter something about the menus which neither of us had seen or touched. This kind of arranged first-date isn’t really casual, a life-altering question looms on the horizon, after all.

But then something happens. Your guard drops. The horizon blurs, the air thickens, your focus fades. Suddenly you find yourself exposed and vulnerable.  And yet, thats when you start to sense a shared space, one of quiet recognition, where you see a piece of yourself in the other person. For my wife and me that day, it was a shared fondness for a neighborhood where we had both spent our late teens, that weird age when we’re still at home but never at home with ourselves. It was a time when we’d walked on the same streets, bought at the same bookstores, went to the same auditoriums, prayed at the same temples. We’d had all these shared experiences, even if we hadn’t actually shared them. In fact, the real mystery was why had we never been at the same place at the same time. It was as if the universe had divined us to meet precisely at that moment, in that dimly lit restaurant, beside those deep orange walls, a foot away from an “ever after” question. Well, at least, that’s how the frothy rom-com fan in me would like to put it. Ask the pragmatic professor instead, and you’ll get an answer less cosmic and more calculus, dealing with measures and manifolds and maximum likelihoods. Myth or math, our evening exhaled into ease, bringing on the airy smiles and outstretched legs. (The menus stayed unseen). 

Let me switch out of my past— for now. This is a lead in to talk about Past Lives, a meditative, melancholic and absolutely mesmerizing first film by Celine Song. Five minutes into the film, we find ourselves at a different kind of  “arranged first date.” This is a date between two twelve year-olds at a museum garden, chaperoned by their mothers. We see the kids stand in front of a statue, gleefully mimicking its pose. They peep and giggle through strange looking sculptures. They have silly exchanges about clothes and colors. We know they are quite fond of each other. Their chemistry is effortless. The girl had said to her mom that she might marry the boy, which is what led to her mom arranging the date. But the mom wasn’t giving her pre-teen daughter a first crack at romance. “We’re immigrating soon,” she says to the boy’s mother, “I just wanted to create good memories for her.” 

Now, if you’ve watched the trailer, you know that this meeting will be more than just a good memory. But before we get to that, I’ll just mention two beautiful visuals from that opening ten minutes of the film. The first is the modernist stone sculpture we see in that museum garden. The sculpture is called New Gaze at the Being, and has two faces, a man and a woman’s, looking at each other, and they look like mirror images. But when seen from afar, they fit together, like the puzzle of one complete face, looking straight at us. That’s what a shared memory is, each person has one piece, looking at the other person, but when taken together, the memory becomes whole, and alive. 

Another visual is the scene where the kids say their goodbyes. They slow walk back from school, the boy with a basketball under his arm, the girl with ponytails flapping her shoulders. They hike up a hill together like they’ve done everyday, until they get to a fork in the road. Thats when we see that her path keeps going up, whereas his road is flat. He walks the path of least resistance, whereas she’s ambitious. She wants to migrate to North America because “Koreans don’t win the Nobel prize for Literature.”  This crossroad becomes a visual metaphor for what unfolds in the remaining two acts of the film, each one taking place exactly twelve years after the last one. In each of these two acts, we find ourselves between these two characters, Na Young (who becomes Nora Moon in North America) and Hae Sung, the boy who stays in Korea. In both these acts, we see their journeys coincide till they reach a crossroad. 

In the first of these acts, Nora and Hae, now twenty-four year olds, meet each other online, for the first time since she migrated. Although it seems like she hadn’t thought of him for many years, they rediscover an old spark, and it kick starts something between the two of them. This passage, of just two people talking over Skype, is so beautiful in how it conveys both the flow of time and the growth of this relationship. We see small changes in position, subtle shifts in expression, slow movements of the camera from one character to another, as a morning in Seoul morphs into an evening in New York. There’s such precision and economy in storytelling that its impossible not to be drawn in. For me, it was this passage that resonated most with my own personal experience. 

It was a couple of hours after a second date with my wife— an afternoon at a coffee shop that turned into a late evening at the beach—  when we had both answered the big question (thank heavens, with the same answer). But then for almost a year till we got married, we were living halfway across the world from each other. When I look back at this period, this long-ish long-distance courtship period, I realize that our relationship, because of the distance, was living in its own universe. Unmindful of the physical world, unmoored to my physical self, it was like living in The Matrix, where the rules of space and time were all warped. To paraphrase the inimitable Agent Smith, I was….. living two lives.  In one, I was a professional who worked for a respectable institution. I had a social security number, paid my taxes, and helped my landlady take out the garbage. In the other life, lived in computers, I was …. 

Alright, that’s as far as The Matrix dialogue works (and yes, I did help my landlady with the garbage). But the reference itself doesn’t end there. At that age, when you find yourself in your first meaningful relationship, it’s a lot like Neo waking up in the Nebuchadnazzar rubbing his eyes like a newborn. Hae Sung puts this bluntly in Past Lives when he looks back at this period and says, “we were just babies back then.”

In Past Lives, it’s during this long distance courtship period that Nora and Hae Sung find themselves at yet another “fork in the road.” Rather than tell you why they got there, let me tell you how the filmmaking gets us there. There’s a moment when the camera takes us high above Seoul, and we see a beautiful vantage of the city. Hae Sung is up there sitting inside a tiny cable car. It’s a closed little world where he’s on a call with Na Young. He shows her the sights of the city through his phone. They share a moment. It’s tender. But then they disconnect. In a quick set of shots, we see that the camera which was circling the characters like a cocoon and cuddling them in closeups, now starts to zoom out. The characters start occupying smaller parts of the frame, as their world outside grows more prominent. At a pivotal moment, the camera stops. The screen comes to a standstill.  Suddenly, we see Nora and Hae uncoupled, as just two individuals. There’s no hurtful words, no dramatic throw downs, just a trickle of tears. The complete lack of drama makes the moment all the more poignant. 

And its not just this moment, the rest of the film too is free of heavy drama. Despite all the philosophical undertones, there’s a Linklater-like levity to the tone. The gravity is all in the silences. This is especially true in the third act— a poetic, near perfect, achingly romantic third act where Hae Sung meets Nora and her husband, Arthur. We expect something explosive here, but the characters are unnervingly calm. It helps that Nora and Arthur are both writers, and they are both acutely self-aware. But there’s also a difference between them. Nora is a playwright; we keep hearing that she is at rehearsals. Her childhood desire to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, had changed to wanting a Pulitzer, and then it became a Tony. Her life is a sequence of rehearsals till she gets it right. But Arthur is a novelist, and he looks at their life as two competing narratives: one is their own story of getting together as two writers who share something in common, and the other story where childhood sweethearts reconnect twenty years later and he’s “the evil white American husband standing in the way.”  And so when Arthur and Hae Sung meet, it doesn’t surprise us that they actually get along, and even share a moment. That moment occurs in the spellbinding sequence in a first-date like setting where Nora/Na Young sits between Hae Sung and Arthur. Thats the final “fork in the road”  when we realize that the fork is not a simple choice but a strange confluence, of past, present and future.

When I first watched the trailer of Past Lives, and heard the voice-over explanation for the title, I laughed. It instantly brought to mind that thing we’ve heard in a hundred Tamil movies, கல்யாணம் ஆயிரம் காலத்து பயிறு — seeds of a marriage are sown a thousand generations before. It’s eight thousand generations in the Korean myth, called In-yun. But as a rom-com fan, the idea of In-yun, that the coming together of two people is predestined, is impossible to resist. After all, even the professor in me would agree that, had the sun and the stars at the times of our birth not stood in cosmic alignment, that first date with my wife might never have been arranged. The film though is less about the providential myth of In-Yun. In fact, the cleverest joke might be how the myth leads Nora to marrying Arthur. Rather than past lives, the film’s focus is on the past within our lives. It questions if our lived past is a primordial kernel that can burst to life at any moment, or if it’s just a time capsule that we stow away each time we enter a new phase of life. Is life itself just a parade of past lives?

When I look back at the time capsule of the first-date with my wife, I realize it could have very well been a past life. That dimly lit restaurant has since shut down. The hotel that housed it has been demolished. The dreamy-eyed grad student who stood on the precipice of a life-altering leap has ceded his stage to a duty-worn practitioner. Remnants from that world keep drifting away each day with the waves of a bygone era. Even so, from time to time, I find myself anchored to  those memories, some of which are still fresh and vivid, as if it all happened yesterday. Like the first time I saw my wife laugh (a joke about my name), the first time her eyes lit up (a compliment about…. her eyes), the first time we ordered food off a menu (chilli corn, on the third date). Even after that day, I remember the first time we held hands, walked together, the first time we fought, tooth, fang and claw. But one thing I don’t remember and would really like to  is the first time I broke down, in front of her. Oddly enough, despite having a superior memory, my wife doesn’t remember it either. (the fact that it was the first of many may have something to do with it). Nevertheless, I’d imagine that would have been the time she first saw the real me. And perhaps that was the moment our relationship had fully unplugged from its Matrix.

Quite fittingly, Past Lives ends with a character crying in the arms of another, for the first time, realizing that rehearsals were over.