Abstract
Past Lives, 1 Celine Song’s 2023 feature film, presents itself as more than a story of lost love. The plot follows Na-young’s (Greta Lee) strong yet fragmented relationship with her childhood-sweetheart, Hae-sung (Teo Yoo), as the pair drift in and out of relevancy and importance in each other’s lives. Despite being recognised as a romantic drama, the real romance lies in how Song speaks to the battle of acculturation and self-identity, inherent amongst the migrant experience.
Na-young emigrates with her family from Korea at the vulnerable age of 12, ambition in tow. Claiming ‘Koreans don’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature’, 1 to her classmates, she embraces her anglicised name, Nora, and seizes emigration into the West as the means to success. Leaving behind Hae-sung, the two veer towards different paths. Twelve and twenty-four years later, we see the two reconnect with entirely different lives. Na-young has assimilated in New York as an independent playwright on the cusp of success and embodies the career-driven, progressive individual we associate with Nora. She marries Arthur (John Magaro), an American author she whimsically falls in love with at a writing retreat, that provides her the added benefit of a Green-Card. Conversely, Hae-sung remains in Korea, living with his parents, studying engineering and routinely seeing his friends at the same restaurant. With his recent relationship ending after his profession was deemed not prestigious or lucrative enough for marriage, Hae-sung reflects the dichotomy between not only two paths taken, but two cultures.
Part of Hae-sung’s allure is that he acts as a perennial symbol of Na-young’s ever-changing relationship with her reinvented self. As the two reunite, we witness her slalom between two cultural identities, one forgotten in favour of one created. Hae-sung is the only person who continues to call Na-young by her Korean name, and speaking only broken English, forces her to use her unpractised native tongue. Describing him as so Korean, and herself as both not Korean but also more Korean when she is with him, we see Na-young become cognisant of the cultural displacement in her life as she opens herself up to enculturation. This is further emphasised by Arthur, who despite his good-willed efforts at learning Korean and embracing its colour and culture, shares with Na-young that she sleep-talks in Korean and dreams in a language he cannot understand. Highlighting, that even whilst ensconced in Western life, her core remains tethered to her Korean upbringing.
In a heart-wrenching final scene, we see Na-young say goodbye to more than a childhood crush. In Hae-sung’s exit, we see the grief in Na-young’s loss of the comfort, familiarity and culture of her homeland, of paths not taken, of selves not actualised. It shows a need for internal reconciliation amongst the permutations of the acculturation experience and of the role of diaspora in the formation of self-identity.
