5. What time means

Why living means time splintering | Past Lives, The National, Seoul, and Listings from me to you.

Every week or so, the Boundless Bypass is published — that’s a travel and life epistle journal for here, there, and everywhere containing:

• A song for the issue

• Musings or longer-form writing on a key topic

• A postcard

• Listings of interest and intrigue along with a round-up of things that I’m ‘tabs open’ on

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Our song this week is: Empire Line from The National*, on their 2017 LP Sleep Well Beast (the cover artwork is Aaron Dessner’s Long Pond Studio).

In choosing this song, I realised that, to me, Empire Line has the same pathos that Past Lives has; both the song and the film force me to sit with all kinds of feelings — the very specific sadness that sometimes seems like the definition of adulthood. It’s the understated reality of the scar tissue of living yet there’s a raw beauty I can not only make peace with, but I can actually embrace as being what the “grown up” journey has been all about.

Notes on listening to Empire Line: If you’re not familiar with this song, I would recommend to start with headphones or an enclosed space to immerse yourself in its utterly flawless production. The ideal playing scenario would be looping repeatedly on a walk surrounded by trees or on a rainy drive. Every line is filled with poetry: the sky’s been falling white flowers/ and there’s icing on the trees. Of all Matt Berninger’s lyrics, the confession, there’s a line that goes all the way/ from my childhood to you, takes me places emotionally that only deepen with time.

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The banquet of cinematic riches that seemingly coincides with the January-February-March awards season is a time I need no encouragement to look forward to. Reflecting back on the 2023 year of film — and the trailers and teasers in late 2022 — it’s felt like the build to the 2024 awards has been like no other. If this is a banquet then it’s been almost a year of feasting.

I think what I enjoyed so much of in each film, is that each is, in their own way, a multi-course degustation of delights in the form of visual, cinematography, screenplay, costuming, sound, and more. From here, this continues to serve as a jump point for us to talk about what we’re seeing with nuance and critical thinking.

Overall, perhaps the awards serve as a prompt and a metaphorical digestif for what we’ve seen, what the artists tell us about it, and what the critical reception is. Then we can use this as an additional stimulant for the deliciousness, intrigue, and theatre we’ve briefly been a part of. In the awards quarter, all of the worlds we’ve spent time in all come alive in their own breaking of the fourth wall. Our heroes and anti-heroes, our villains, our conductors, our masterminds — they’re all playing together while we watch on and relish every last morsel.

With this on my mind, I write to you about Celine Song’s, writer and director, Past Lives.

If I was picking the film of this year’s field that’s definitively made its mark on me, it’s this sublime release that took me over 12 months to see.

Irrespective of the other contenders, and purely about it as a cinematic offering, it’s one of the most stunning and honest films I’ve ever seen. I’ve felt its presence all around me in the last couple of months since watching it with my husband on the sofa of our house in the new country we’ve just moved to. There’s so many questions raised in this film — family, friendship, partnership, marriage, creativity, humanity. These relatable reckonings go far beyond the will-they-won’t-they questions of fate — irrespective of how much I watched this possibility with bated breath, too.

In forming my outlook on the message of the story, a leading comparison I’ve come across is to the Before trilogy. These films are forever in my top five, however my position is that outside of time as a storytelling function, the similarities are benign.

Unlike the referenced trilogy, Past Lives brings us characters that — despite somewhat grappling with the cerebral question of Serendipity — are instead living out the splintering truths of decision-making. The story we experience presents it to us gently. Fate is another character that shows up in the all-too-real, tense delicacy of how the now is informed by the past. Then, it reveals the other side of its face, shadowy but tenderly visible as the story progresses: how the now is also en route to shaping the future.

I think that this makes Past Lives a portrait of Nora and her own ghosts and all of these past lives. As a viewer, the subtlety of this emerged to me because of the timelines of storytelling. Rather than it being about the arcs of separated lovers, what it marked to me is how time passes when we’re in different places or phases of life.

For Nora, it’s told as these distinct eras of her childhood, young adulthood, and adulthood. We spend more time getting to know the character of her childhood love Hae Sung because of where their timelines intersected. Equally she left South Korea at a highly formative age hence the signposting of 12-year increments; we understand that what happened then remains highly important to who she is now. Accordingly, we only get a small glimpse of her husband Arthur’s character due to when their timelines intersect. Even so, the gentle hints of his personality and spirit — like his own work as a writer, gentle demeanour and welcoming efforts for her oldest friend, and learning Korean to speak with her family and comprehend what she’s saying while she dreams — show us who he is in relation to her.

All of this paints a vivid, yet sensitively-restrained portrait of Nora. All of these characters orbit her through the motif of fated love, as she moves through the world and these multiple inter-woven lives. Thus these other characters almost function to explain her living out of these lives — consciously and unconsciously, decisively and indecisively — in all the ways we as the audience do this in our own lives.

To better understand Past Lives, I would actually point to the film adaptation of Brooklyn rather than the Before trilogy. In the 1950s film setting, we see the protagonist Eilis pulled between her past in Ireland, her new life and flourishing in New York, and then returning to Ireland as the Irish-New Yorker. Between the two films there is a believable construction of two protagonists that are choosing to move forward and accept the diverging of their life journeys. While I see certain resonant conflicts between the two films, I would absolutely allow for the contrasting cultural and historic moments.

The nucleus of truth remains the same for Nora and Eilish as they move through their new lives. To survive and swim in new places, new bodies of water, they must make their way upstream, go against the currents of their respective existences, and adapt to a foreign life. Nora was once Na Young and as she explains in the middle “life” of her story, not even her mother calls her by her birth name anymore. For this seismic revelation alone, I feel that it’s reductive simply to look at Past Lives as being about love stories when there’s so much more happening with Nora. I found that there is a subversion of the idea of telling her story through romantic relationships when it’s about the iterations of her identity — including something as disruptive as a name change.

This brings me to the characters’ internal tension and a motif that I strongly relate to in both Past Lives and Brooklyn. Perhaps what I perceive as the core theme of Past Lives hit me harder than the love theme because I regularly think about past lives as a bigger reality of the onward movement of our lives. This whole thing inspires and haunts me as a reality of our journey as adults. Any time we make a choice, we’re affecting the timeline, making a glitch in the matrix, and parallel realities emerge. This is true of everything from universities and jobs chosen to falling in love, moving away, and even how we build our families. I see now that we’re all surrounded by these past lives and particularly so when we connect with people from other times in our lives and return to or visit places we’ve lived.

For me, it hits home more deeply again due to the immigrant story and how this creates past lives. As my dad has emphasised to me as his mother, my grandmother, emphasised to him when he was 19, “Everyone here [in your hometown] is the same, it’s you that’s changed.” Hae Sung says to Nora that she’s a person who leaves and the subtext of that could means so many things. I see that she’s courageously going out into the unknown again and again — South Korea to Canada, Canada to the U.S. In that way, it’s no surprise that after the immigration transit from SK to Canada, we don’t see Nora’s family onscreen again though there’s glimpses of them in other ways.

I empathise because of the reciprocal parts of my own life — and my mother’s own experience as an immigrant — and what it’s like when you live out of the country where your immediate family is. Who you are is constantly shifting and how you identify with it, live it, and reconcile it is a deeply faceted, ever-evolving topic. In fact, with Nora, I saw the strength it’s taken to keep going and to make these wrenching sacrifices when she breaks down in her husband’s arms — he’s the home she’s chosen — and he loves who she is, past lives and all. (Ed. note: both my husband and I sobbed talking about this scene after watching because we both know something like that feeling so well, and I’m choked up writing this now).

I felt that I saw so much of Nora’s inner world play out when she’s interacting with these other characters. It’s a rare and emotionally astute way to do this. I would point towards this thought-provoking and insightful essay from Petya K. Grady on Lifequakes** that explains more about this aspect of the immigrant journey in terms of inter-cultural identity, language, communication, and self-expression as it unpacks even more of the evocative interchanges during the deftly-constructed scene at the bar.

My resounding sense of Past Lives was reinforced when actor Greta Lee (Nora) shared in this wonderful actor roundtable*** that her mother called her after she watched the film and the following happened:

“…my mom went to see Past Lives and afterwards she was sobbing and I've never, I don't even know if I've seen her cry before and I was deeply uncomfortable with what was happening…but she was, she was a wreck and and I, in that moment you know it was a premiere, I didn't feel like we could really get into it…

Several days pass and she called me, and she said, ‘I'm driving,’ she said, ‘I'm still crying.’

I'm like, ‘God, what's wrong, is everything okay?’

And she said, ‘Um, I'm Nora.’

I was like, ‘What?’

And she said, you know in her way, she said, ‘You think this movie is about you but it's about me.’

…behind that was a real sense of seeing herself that I really did not expect and that I mean, yeah, and that now I do I feel like I know her in a different way.”

As an immigrant — as of four years ago — I can imagine having precisely the same conversation with my mum who was an immigrant to my country of birth.

Past Lives is a butterfly of a film that requires us to lean in and sit in the rawness of our experiences — my overwhelming sense is that it does the film’s heart a disservice to foist a macro lens of “love stories” when watching, thinking about it, or discussing it. In this way, it requires active, patient, and committed viewing. Sitting in that is an effort and, certainly, it’s draining or tricky to be in such a vulnerable space when the goal is to be entertained.

Feeling verklempt through dialogue, acting, and scene after arresting scene can stir up our own experiences in a way that yanks us into a story in a much more interactive mode than we may be prepared for. Nevertheless, Celine Song has given us a textbook example of, “Show, don’t tell”, and for that, I would say that leaping into the freefall of revisiting homesickness, loneliness, heartbreak, and yearning rewarded me as a viewer — time and time again. Ultimately, this film’s exceptional writing, directing, and picture execution delivers a haunting, satisfying elegy to those eponymous Past Lives.

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This epistle’s postcard is from Seoul, capital of South Korea. You can fly to Seoul from a range of international ports — at this point, South Korea’s land border with North Korea remains closed — and there are international ferry crossings from Japan, China, and Russia.

Seoul, South Korea | Sungnyemun Gate

Every time I land in a city, especially a capital city, I brace myself for busyness. In metropolitan terms, this translates to noise, bustle, teeming streets and buildings and stations, and artificial brightness that eclipses any natural light. Now when I look back through my camera roll from Seoul, two things are crystal clear: a blue winter’s sky and shot after shot of trees from sky bridges, parks, kerbsides, and squares. The fortresses and castles stunned me. The mesmerising architecture overlaid on skyrises with silhouettes of evergreen trees that endure as it nears freezing. Locals walking arm-in-arm to lunch and the mountains looming on the skyline. The whole three days I’m pinching myself that we’re here in the country where my dad loved living for three months. Later, it’s 6am and we walk home from watching the South Korea team play Brazil in the World Cup in a bar of students in pyjamas. Blinking up at the lights, the morning is dark. This great wide city of nine million people is silent and asleep. Our time is so brief, we could never make it count. It starts snowing and we twirl, the green man forgotten. Early risers on their bikes stop beside us, videoing the flakes, and I can’t believe we’re part of this. Icy crumbs clinging to our faces, we’re bundled, lockstep in wonder — it’s Seoul and it’s snowing. Two dreams happening at once.

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What are the Listings?

Listings have traditionally been used to share ‘What’s on’ in Arts and Culture in cities and communities all over the world. They can be innovative and grassroots, linked to activism, and help people find out what’s happening. These are my listings for you — one pal to another.

Listings for Sunday, March 10, 2024

• A silly something — my husband’s been digging up Star Wars ads from Chile and they’re so well done and a good giggle. Advertising fascinates me — like this Mad Men S1E13 episode scene for ‘The Carousel’ that still packs a punch.

• I’ve been relishing Masters of the Air for high-quality production delving into another branch of WWII. The script is a little lacklustre unlike the costuming — this article about the authentic replica flight jackets is right up my alley…brb opening a savings account for one of their custom pieces made in Scotland. Bonus rec: also watching SAS Rogue Heroes and already prefer it (except the jackets).

• Two trailers for two anticipated adaptations dropped this week: The Idea of You (can we please discuss what we think of Anne’s wardrobe as Solène based on the trailer? Feels in conflict to the book’s uber-chic descriptions substantiated in this 2019 Bad on Paper interview with the author Robinne Lee) and A Gentleman In Moscow.

• I’ve been hungrily deep-diving (dishing?) the Off Menu podcast. Standouts so far are their interviews with Florence Pugh, Richard E. Grant, and Taron Edgerton (try not to start proclaiming at your preferred volume, “Treat for the chef!”, the moment you listen to this one).

• This week I was reminded of my best book of 2023: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel — a gripping mystery concept that’s exquisite from start to finish. This came back to me as I started reading How High We Go In The Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, a gripping set of interlinked futuristic stories that I’m eking out as it’s engrossing albeit brilliantly, intensely realistic.

Thank you for reading these Boundless Bypass epistles — I adore writing them to you. Please let me know what you think of the Oscars?! I’d love to chat with you, Aoife

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*Every week’s song is added to this evergreen Boundless Bypass Spotify playlist.

**This issue of Lifequakes is behind a subscriber wall and I savour Petya’s work.

***also recommended in Epistle 3. Wool Everything.