An Ode to Inyeon and Childhood Loves; An Analysis of Celine Song’s Dreamy Directorial Debut, Past Lives

In an interview with Celine Song, she explains the heartbreaking final scene of her film Past Lives, where Nora, the main character, is walking home. She says “That walk is about the grief for the little girl that she never got to grieve. It’s not about, ‘oh my god, I wish I went with Hae Sung, it’s more about the girl. Somebody is grieving a part of themselves they never got to grieve.”

Past Lives, nominated for Best Picture and Original Screenplay, is a film for people who silently mourn the ghosts of who they would’ve been if they hadn’t left their home countries. Rather than a romance, it’s a film about the struggle to piece together the multiple identity shifts as an Asian immigrant who left her homeland in her childhood. It represents the beauty of being truthful, being honest, and overall just living authentically to one’s self. In the simplest sense, this film reflects being the one to leave everything behind for bigger things, because maybe to someone else “we can be the one who stayed.”

The film begins in South Korea, showing the viewer two close childhood friends, Na Young and Hae Sung. Through their interactions, it's clear these two are intertwined in a way that’s almost indescribable, but it’s only when the film flashes to the future that it is truly evident how their relationship is supposed to be a reflection of the movie's central theme; Inyeon.As Nora gets older, she introduces the concept of Inyeon. Nora, tells her future husband Arthur one evening: "It's an inyeon if two strangers even walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush, because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives.” Inyeon, in Korean, represents multiple meanings, including fate, destiny, and even the karmic connection between two people. However, in this film, Inyeon represents Hae-Sung and Na Young's relationship to each other.

While watching this film, it’s almost impossible to fathom that this is Song’s feature directorial debut. The movie, albeit critiqued for being slow, pushes boundaries of what love stories can be in a way so unique from Asian American films we have seen within media. Focusing on an immigrant woman and the nuances of diasporic identity, Past Lives even incorporates a bilingual script and embraces an entirely Asian concept to recicitate the story meant to be told.

As time passes, Seasons change, Korean changes to English, and Na Young becomes Nora, a Korean American immigrant woman. The only thing that stays the same throughout the film is the concept of Inyeon. Past Lives explores the concept of Inyeon through the countless interactions between Nora and Hae Sung. The storylines of two unrelated characters solely connected by their childhood “romance,” unfolding in parallel, only briefly intertwining in moments that reflect true Inyeon. The only thing I’d finally understood by the end of the film was that although Nora was tied to Hae Sung, she never truly wanted to be with him. She was tied to what he represented.

When she finally breaks down near the end of the film she isn't mourning the potential relationship that could’ve been, she is mourning the part of herself she was with Hae Sung when she was ripped from Korea as a child. Hae Sung represented the parts of who she had to leave behind as an immigrant child to thrive in the West. He represents those versions of herself and remnants of the past, that she had to sacrifice to focus on her dreams and aspirations.

But that’s who Nora is portrayed to be, an immigrant woman who never wavers from her dreams.

That’s why the love Nora had for her husband Arthur versus the connection she had for Hae Sung were never mutually exclusive. In a profound line from the movie, he even reveals that Nora speaks only in Korean in her sleep, telling her “You dream in a language I can’t understand. It’s like this whole place inside you I can’t go.” This represents the dual identities that live within Nora, that maybe even through love, her husband may never understand.

That is to say, if you’re looking for a cinematically dreamy, but quiet film to cry to, this is the perfect movie. Past Lives is the ideal film for reiterating what it means to be human, especially as an immigrant in the West. To be human is to feel pain, and to feel pain is to feel loss. Loss of the different paths you could’ve taken, the things you could’ve willed, and even the people who may have left. I loved Celine Song's complex portrayal of Nora, Hae-Sung, and her husband Arthurs relationships because it was clear there were so many puzzle pieces strung together into the different parts of their story. Rather than a story about romantic relationships, it was about reconnection and grief. It was a story about the things left behind, the things lost, all floating around until the passage of time whisked them away for new memories to come in.