Past Lives, a film by Celine Song

This 2023 Korean film concerns the long-term fascination of a pair of Koreans, initially 12-year-olds. Hae Sung has finally earned the highest grade on a test, usually Na Young’s spot. Her artist parents announce to Na Young and her sister that they are immigrating to Canada, and the girls should choose Anglicized names. She decides on Nora Moon. She grows up in Toronto, becomes a playwright, and we see her at a writing residency in New York.  Spoiler Alert – I'm going to discuss the whole film. If you don't want to know more before you see it, Stop Now!

Twelve years later, Hae Sung makes contact through her father’s FaceBook page, and for a couple of years the two have frequent video calls. She asks if he plans to visit, he says maybe in a couple of years, asks her about visiting Korea; she doesn’t see that on her horizon, and breaks off contact. Another dozen years pass. Hae Sung is an engineer. He still longs for her, and decides to travel to New York – and admits to friends that he hopes to see Nora. 

They are pleased to be together, but their lives have diverged: she’s been married 7 years to an American Jew she met during her writing fellowship; he recently broke up with his long-time girlfriend because, in his own estimation, he is too ordinary, and as an only child she deserves an extraordinary spouse. “Past lives” refers to reincarnation, and to the idea of Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths in which an infinity of options are reduced to our individual trajectories: “past” in the sense of “gone by.” 

Nora’s husband Arthur asks whether, if she’d become involved with a different man at the writing residency, she might now be married to someone else, and her life with Arthur would never have happened. But Nora quashes that – here they are, together, and this is the life they have chosen and created. There is no other. She does not see some could-have-been life in her memories of Hae Sung – she is who and where she is, wholeheartedly. 

But when she, Arthur, and Hae Sung sit in a bar and she and Hae Sung have a conversation in Korean Arthur can barely follow, they talk about the Korean concept of In-Yon, in which affinity is a result of thousands of years of reincarnations, and cannot be denied. He speculates: perhaps in a past life she was a queen and he was a henchman, and they had an illicit affair. Or she was a songbird and he was a branch she alit on, before she flew off. But affinity or not, she stands firm in her choices: she can only be who she is now, and to sink into regret is to abandon the present in favor of some past life she cannot live. 

The other layer explored here is the immigrant experience – she explains to Arthur that seeing Hae Sung reminds her how Americanized her Korean American friends are, and how the culture Hae Sung is part of is one she gladly shed. Arthur knows some Korean, and Hae Sung has learned a bit of English, but their limited knowledge is one more aspect of their discomfort with each other. Both are jealous: Hae Sung of the man Nora chose to build her life with, Arthur of the man his wife can so easily communicate with, who shared first love. 

And yet, there is no explosion, no fight – as adults they assess their positions and accept them. It’s good to see a grown-up film!

The Mountain Lion, by Jean Stafford

Ostensibly The Mountain Lion (1947) is a young adult novel, but although it is about children who become youths, it is not especially for children. Or maybe it is: the unblinkered viewpoints of Ralph and his younger sister Molly, third and fourth children of the widowed Mrs. Fawcett, are as unrestrained as the minds of children – their inner thoughts are often judgmental and hateful. Their older sisters, Leah and Rachel, are socially involved, vain, and in thrall to their fearful and overdramatic mother. 

Ralph and particularly Molly are steeped in contempt. We meet them at ages ten and eight, respectively, as they leave school together with nosebleeds resulting from a bout with scarlet fever. The fever seems not only to have shrunk and weakened their bodies, but perhaps the isolation together has also warped their minds, so that they will never manage the conformity of their mother’s father, Grandpa Bonney, a fat successful man (friend of Grover Cleveland!) or his lineage. Mrs. Fawcett’s stepfather, Grandpa Kenyon, a rancher and rough-hewn man-of-the-world, is Ralph and Molly’s ideal of an adult human; the rest they despise. 

Over the course of six years we watch the two change, grow up and apart, their alienation finally including each other. And yet, their spirits are simpatico in ways they will never be with anyone else. Stafford writes with an acid pen and this tale of childhood is harsh, though leavened with humor. In it are scraps of Molly’s compositions, for even at eight she knows she is a writer, composing poems such as Gravel:

 “Gravel, gravel on the ground 

Lying there so safe and sound, 

Why is it you look so dead? 

Is it because you have no head?” 

 And, at a dinner where their mother hosts the local preacher and his wife, we have this snippet of Ralph’s observation: “The horrible pastor looked at Ralph and for some reason winked his light green, reptilian eye. The boy trembled and looked away and this time glanced with ardent loathing at Mrs. Follansbee’s round puffy face whose vulgar snub nose complemented her husband’s downward curving one… Ralph wished both of them would get bubonic plague.” 

 If you think of children as kind and innocent, this book will appall you. All the same, it rings truer to their bloody-minded imaginings than sweeter stories. Reading this may rekindle memories of your own childhood: of wishing people dead or mutilated, of dividing human society into those few you can tolerate and the majority you despise, and dreading having to move among these adults as you become one yourself.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This magnificent epic novel, a classic upon publication in 1967, in English in 1970 in a masterful translation by Gregory Rabassa, still sweeps readers away to Macondo, a village in the South American jungle, founded by the larger-than-life Buendia family, and ending with them a century later. Seven generations of Buendias struggle with plagues, pestilence, and natural disasters, but their bigger problems stem from their incestuous yearnings, wars, and the encroachments of the world. 

Among the book’s themes is memory, and its antithesis, forgetting. A plague of insomnia descends on Macondo, one of its effects being erosion of memory. To combat this, one Buendia decides to label each item. However, “Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.” 

Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who fought 32 wars and lost them all, eventually retreats from the world to the household workshop. The horrors of war fill his memory; the concentration required to craft tiny gold fishes is his only refuge. He is honored with a Jubilee, with a street named after him, but over generations he fades to legend, then is forgotten entirely. 

Even history experiences forgetting, a devastating form of solitude. For example, a bastard of a younger generation visits the town’s ancient priest to ask about his parentage: “Seeing him lost in the labyrinths of kinship, trembling with uncertainty, the arthritic priest, who was watching him from his hammock, asked him compassionately what his name was. 

“Aureliano Buendia,” he said. 

“Then don’t wear yourself out searching,” the priest exclaimed with final conviction. “Many years ago there used to be a street here with that name and in those days people had the custom of naming their children after streets.” 

This is upside-down, of course: streets are named after people. But it’s also one image in the tapestry of forgetfulness that ultimately seals the town’s fate. Terrible events are erased as though they never occurred, leaving the one who does remember in a state of solitary torment. 

Conversely, memory confers power. The matriarch, Ursula, eventually goes blind, but tells no one, and none suspect because she is so observant and her memory so spotless that she can not only navigate the house as well as anyone with sight, but even locate lost items: “So when she heard Fernanda all upset because she had lost her ring, Ursula remembered that the only thing different that she had done that day was to put the mattresses out in the sun because Meme had found a bedbug the night before. Since the children had been present at the fumigation, Ursula figured that Fernanda had put the ring in the only place where they could not reach it: the shelf. Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.” 

This book is its own paean to memory – you can read it, then read it again, and again, and each time some new detail lodges in your mind. Populated with remarkable characters and told in both exquisite detail and narrative grandeur, One Hundred Years of Solitude will haunt you.

Roma, a film by Alfonso Cuaron

If you know anything about this much-lauded film, you’re already aware that Roma is a slice-of-life based on Alfonso Cuaron’s childhood, seen primarily through the experiences of the family housekeeper. Shot in lustrous black-and-white, with the camera mostly in the middle distance - the frame of a nearby observer - the story immerses us in personal and national travails of the early 1970s in Mexico, primarily in Mexico City.

The parents are upper-middle-class intellectuals, and their home in the eponymous Roma neighborhood is rich with the trappings of that life - books and lovely furnishings, spacious areas for dining, TV-watching, and family activities. Each of the four children has his/her own room, but they all share Cleo, who wakes them, helps them dress, with her comadre Adela makes them breakfast, and gets them all off to school. While they’re out she’s changing sheets, collecting laundry to scrub on the roof and hang to dry, cleaning, running errands. At the end of the day the cycle is reversed - again the family is fed, tea is fetched for the husband, Cleo tucks in the children one at a time, singing each to sleep. At the end of that long day, she’s in the kitchen washing and putting away dishes for tomorrow. The two young servants live in a small room off the garage, and the daily rhythm of their lives will look familiar to any homemaker - cooking, cleaning, sweeping, scrubbing, and tending to the endless needs of others.

The family’s lives are disrupted, and the way they cope highlights the central role Cleo plays in their world. She may be a paid lower-class addition to the household, but when it comes down to it, she is a member of their family, bossed but also cherished and, yes, loved.

Cuaron’s passion for detail is clear in all the camera takes in - a busy clinic, a hacienda where they go for holiday, Cleo and Adela’s day off, the street vendors, bands, and protest marches that crowd their neighborhood, the 1960s and 70s cars, ubiquitous dogs, jets overhead reminding us they live in a large city. The credits are extensive - he invested much of himself in this homage to his family and particularly to Libo (his Cleo stand-in), to whom it’s dedicated.

The density of images brings to mind Ingmar Bergman’s wonderful late-career film Fanny and Alexander, which celebrates the textures and visual richness of a warm and open life, in high contrast to the stark asceticism of his usual priests and patriarchs. Though Bergman’s film was in saturated color, the detail, the wondrous individuality of each object picked out by the camera, is the same. It reminds us that children often remember in vivid specifics what adults consign to categories: dogs, or windows, or cars. We are richer for Cuaron’s exquisitely-shared memories.

Hiroshima Mon Amour

A beautifully restored version of Alain Resnais' 1959 black-and-white film Hiroshima Mon Amour is making the rounds, and you should see it. In a time of noisy, violent, in-your-face cinema, step into a story with a jarring reality - stones that burned in the 10,000 degree A-Bomb blast, iron that melted, people whose hair fell out and skin sloughed off, deformed babies and disfigured burn victims - presented calmly. The horror is not in gore, but in realization that humans did these things to each other.

Intercut with these images is the lovemaking, in a Hiroshima hotel room, of a French woman and a Japanese man. Gradually their story unfolds: she is an actress, finishing an international film about peace; only last night did she invite him to her room, and tomorrow she returns to Paris. They are in love, and yet she intends to leave. She describes herself as a woman of dubious morals, then jokes she is dubious of morals. Both say they are happily married.

As he questions, she talks about her youth in Nevers, a French city on the Loire. During the war, she and a German soldier fell in love, and met wherever they could. On the day France was liberated someone shot him, and as she lay with the dying man she was found out, her hair hacked off, humiliated and scorned, and descended into madness. Two years later, restored to sanity, she made her way to Paris and never went back, and blocked out the experience.

Marguerite Duras, who won the Prix Goncourt for the script, asks us to think about memory, about how forgetting is both healing - allowing us to continue with life - and ravaging - we lose what matters most when we can no longer bring its details to mind. The touch of a lover's hand, his warmth, their full hearts - when these fade, we lose something precious. Not to remember is not to have lived.

The French woman makes a gift of her secret loss to this stranger/lover, this Japanese man she will never see again, and in the process he allows her to re-experience that first momentous love. When she tells him she has never shared this story with her husband, the Japanese man is thrilled and elated - only he holds this potent memory, feels its power over her. Through her last night in Hiroshima they sit in a tea-house where he plies her with beer while she confesses, then we think maybe she will stay with him - we know it's impossible and they both agree it's impossible but so is love: surely there is a way to sustain this experience They want it, we want it for them, we know it can't happen.

Many masterfully-composed images benefit from the restoration - the patterns made by overlapping palm fronds against the sky while the lovers fill the foreground; long dolly-shots through a series of high-roofed market buildings; a vertical bar of light reflected off the river behind her as they sit in the tea-house; the peeping of frogs, that same soundtrack in her Nevers memories. Hiroshima Mon Amour touches heart and mind profoundly - see it on a big screen.