Dreaming in Korean

or being between two places

Last night I went to see Past Lives at the Barbican. It tells the story of two childhood friends, Nora and Hae Sung, and the way they weave in and out of each other’s lives over the course of 24 years after Nora’s family emigrate to Canada.

As it slowly unfolds, it becomes clear that this is both a story about destiny and friendship, but also under that, about identity, how it’s formed over time and how layered we become.

When the film opens, Nora is 12 and living in South Korea. She’s happy to move because ‘Koreans don’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature’, by the time the film ends, she’s a 36 year old playwright, married to a Jewish novelist, Arthur, and living in New York. At three different points in the film she declares her ambitions: at 12, to win the Nobel in Literature; at 24, a Pulitzer; at 36, (after a long pause) to win a Tony. Her world contracting as it expands.

When Hae Sung arrives in New York, Nora’s inner emotional life is thrown into turmoil, in a series of intimate scenes, we see the knock on effect this has on her marriage to Arthur, as he begins to doubt, not that she loves him, but why she would. Nora’s struggle to reconcile the past with the present is neatly captured in the first scenes and the fourth to last scene, both set in a New York bar, with her situated between the two men, but more, here Nora is caught between Korea and America, between ambition and reality, between who she was and who she’s become, and the inevitability of the distance between each position. The final two scenes are almost unbearably wrought, with a daring two minutes of silence on the screen; a silence so full it’s difficult to watch. We’ve all known those silences, and the way they stretch.

It’s a great film. Already nominated for and the winner of several awards, it’s a startling piece of debut writing from Celine Song who’s found the humanity in the story and drawn this out. It’s as subtle as it is slow, which is another of its strengths. You have to really watch, really think, to get under the skin of it.

The reason I’m writing about it instead of just thinking about it, is that at 3am, I still couldn’t sleep, turning one scene over and over. Near the end, Arthur tells Nora how when she talks in her sleep, she talks in Korean, a whole world he can’t understand or enter. He seems more unsettled by this than the presence of Hae Sung, as if her true identity is exposed in this subconscious choice of Korean over English. I think I found this so startling because I often still dream of being a Jehovah’s Witness. The expectation should be that these dreams are nightmares and sometimes they are, but sometimes, they are not. It’s just a dream of a life that once was realer than the life I have now. For nearly 30 years, this whole system of belief was home. It was not an easy one to leave. For the last three years, writing and promoting The Last Days, this world was so vividly alive for a while that it risked enveloping the one I’ve made for myself. This was strange, and possibly dangerous. I no longer feel caught between then and now, I have recently stopped judging myself for being Worldly and sinful, opting instead for flawed, but still in dreams, this world holds an appeal I can’t or won’t explain. Watching this felt similar to reading Gabriel Krauze’s Who they Was, I read an interview with him where he compared being in a gang to returning from war, no one on the outside could really understand. And this is how it feels to leave something that was the scaffold to my whole life, you have to learn to assimilate in a whole new culture; I didn’t have frames of reference, even my language had been limited and manipulated, it’s not a simple leaving a building or a group of people, it’s a long process that doesn’t always make sense, and these other stories of difference and identity go some way to telling what it’s like. And this is the heart of why culture matters, because it shows things we’d otherwise not see or want to look at, making us look out as much as in, and I like looking out.