Tag: movies

  • Past Lives – Layers of complexity

    Past Lives is a 2023 romantic drama film focused on the literal past life of a Korean immigrant child in North America. The central plot line is how this child’s parents decide to leave South Korea for Canada, how the protagonist then moves to the USA for professional success, finds it, finds love and in between, reconnects with her childhood sheetheart, disconnects and then is forced to reconnect and examine their relationship.

    I will not review the film nor post spoilers. I will take another angle – the angle visible to someone who is themself an immigrant, or a double or triple immigrant depending on how you define it. The movie’s protagonist claims to have immigrated twice, first to Canada and then to the USA. I immigrated from India to Bahrain, then to India, then Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and finally Canada.

    These moves taught me some simple truths – home is a state of mind but for some, that is intertwined with a location. Any relationship takes effort – love, friendship, siblings, parents, children. Those are thoughts for another time.

    Your name is an integral part of who you are. Not just your name, but the names your friends use. I have one legal name but several nicknames. Some friends know me as Fish. Others as Elda. Others as simply Eldrich. Each has a different connotation in my mind, a different emotion. It is much the same in the film – Na Young becomes Nora. A new name for a new life. One can pretend that your old name ceased to exist, but it doesn’t.

    Another is language. Yes, I am fluent in English but I do not speak the same English with everyone. In Canada, I stick to standard English with metaphors borrowed from cricket and football. With my friends from Bombay, I still use English but with a sauce of Hindi and a seasoning of Marathi words. With yet others in Bombay I speak English but end every sentence with “men”, similar to the Caribbean “mahn”. The inflection is also entirely different. What I say, what I mean, the phrasing, the cadence, they all change with language. Even more different is my speech in Hindi where I use English vocabulary as a crutch until I figure out what the Hindi word for encyclopedia is. (it is ज्ञानकोश or gyan-kosh; विश्वकोश or vishwa-kosh according to Collins).

    At one point, the character of Nora remarks how marriage is like two trees in the same pot. Their roots intertwine and this leads to conflict. How you deal with that conflict is important.

    Another theme in the film is the desire to outgrow your past, to not be bound by it. I too feel this sometimes. You cannot deny your past, it is forever there but it was a moment in time. A moment that has passed, with people who likely changed. You, too, changed.

    Then there is ethnicity and how it means different things in the new world versus in the old world. I am Indian. I cannot change that. Lots of people in Canada are ethnically Indian however, they are distinct from me in an important way – they are Indian AND Canadian. Both at the same time. I am not and never will be despite official documents saying otherwise. I am Indian Indian. From India, fresh off the plane, with an Indian accent and many Indian sensibilities. In the new world, cultures are often reduced to the occasional festivity, the odd piece of cultural baggage, the archaic if baseless custom, aromas in a kitchen or restaurant. In the old world, an ethnicity is who you are, your identity, your role in the world. It is how you behave, how you are expected to behave. Your ethnicity is your culture, how you carry yourself, the food you eat, the ingredients you buy, where you live. It is a curiously new-world phenomenon that your ethnicity and nationality can be distinct and different. Separate, compartmentalised, changing with the date. On diwali, you are Punjabi. Canadian on Christmas.

    Finally, your past home, your homeland, the motherland. As a first-generation migrant, you never really leave it and it never leaves you. Your relationship to it is different depending on circumstance. Some – like Syrians or Sri Lankans – have a tortured, fractious relationship with the mother country. A civil war, ethnic tensions, decades of dysfunction mean that not much of their lives are left there. A clean break for some, a swift detachment for others. In the other case – such as mine – life in the mother country goes on without you. Those you left behind carry on in peace, living their lives without you and you without them. India is not at war, there is no conflict and a large section of my extended family continue to live there. I visit them occasionally but it is a strained visit. They have changed. India has changed. My recollection of the country, of the city, of my neighbourhood is no longer reality. It was but a moment in time. A past life, maybe?