Someone Who Leaves
In praise of "Past Lives"
I’ve been trying to figure out why the movie Past Lives had such an impact on me. If you haven’t seen it, Past Lives, is a movie about a woman, Nora, who immigrates to the US with her family as a child, leaving her best friend and childhood crush, Hae Sung, back in Korea. After some years of no contact Hae Sung finds Nora online and they keep in touch for a little while, but Nora asks that they take a break from talking when her life gets too busy, seeing Hae Sung as a distraction. They fall out of touch for a long time. In her adulthood, Nora becomes a writer, and she meets her future husband at a writer’s residency, where she tells him about a Korean concept called In-Yun.
It’s not Nora and Arthur who are In-Yun (forgive me if I’m not using that correctly), but Nora and Hae Sung. He finds her after many years and comes to visit her in New York, but the reunion is not what either of them thought it would be. It’s like the adult versions of themselves don’t match up with the kids who used to love each other.
We watch as Nora, in spending time with someone who knew her when she was different, becomes even more who she is. We watch as Hae Sung realizes who Nora is, and realizes that she has changed and he has not. We watch him accept who Nora is, and we watch him name it for her because she cannot.
I saw Past Lives when it came out in June of last year, the same month I left someone/somewhere. Leaving is something I’m familiar with. When I feel trapped, or confined, or misunderstood, or sometimes even just bored, I run, far and fast. Beyond the writer thing and the fact that the person I left was someone I met at a writer’s residency, I saw myself in Nora because I am someone who leaves.
But it’s more complicated than that. In the end, even though Nora is someone who leaves, it is Hae Sung who leaves her. But he does it with the belief that they will see each other again.
If you’ll allow me a brief digression: I’m reading a novel right now called Hello Beautiful. It’s loosely based on/inspired by Little Women. I love Little Women for obvious reasons: Jo. Jo, if she had been born in a different century, would have been someone who leaves. She tried to when she said, “I love my liberty too well to be in any hurry to give it up,” in response to Laurie’s marriage proposal.
The character who is kinda-sorta based on Jo in Hello Beautiful has to make a hard choice that means leaving a lot of people she loves. But before she does that she has a realization, put this way by author Ann Napolitano:
“Because she was clear about what she didn’t want, she was alone.”
It’s a lonely thing, being the one who leaves, but leaving is so often the only way to hold onto one’s liberty. It was for me. Nora is lucky enough to have Arthur, someone she did not have to give up her liberty for—we watch him let her wield her liberty liberally without much protesting—but that doesn’t mean she isn’t lonely.
I keep writing about leaving, trying to figure out why I do it, trying to find shame in it despite my not feeling ashamed of it because people always react as if I’ve done something shameful when I leave. I live in a world that values sticking it out and getting out of your comfort zone and never quitting, but leaving is my comfort zone. It’s when I’m stagnant that I feel uncomfortable. It’s Nora’s mother who says, “If you leave something behind, you gain something, too.”
But that still doesn’t quite get at exactly why Past Lives hit me the way it did.
Nora left Hae Yung and he found her again. I think I know that will never happen to me—the people I’ve left might find me, but not because they were looking. We will never reunite in a shocked embrace the way Nora and Hae Sung do, completely without ill will. So, watching Past Lives, it was like I was watching myself in a parallel universe (or another life) living out a future that I know isn’t available to me in this one. When Hae Yung found Nora it was awkward and a little sad, but he found her. She was found.
But when I watched Nora take that long walk back to Arthur after Hae Sung left, and watched her break down when she got there, I understood the burden of being found. Leaving, I realized, isn’t always the hardest thing.
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Loved this movie too!