From Crazy Rich Asians to new romance Past Lives, a raft of recent movies has featured reconnections with distant homelands – deftly addressing complex questions around diaspora and identity
, the hotly tipped romance film by South Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song, the idea of a prodigal return is found less in a physical place, but in each other. Nora Moon and Hae Sung are 12-year-old friends and classmates in Seoul. Nora is an overachiever and quick to cry, which she does when Hae Sung pips her to first place in an exam. What’s the big deal, he asks her; you usually beat me.
Nora’s parents are planning to move to Toronto, and her mother wants to create lasting memories for her daughter in Korea before they leave. She asks Nora if she likes any boys; Nora mentions Hae Sung. They go on a playdate before she departs. Twelve years later, Nora is a playwright in New York and Hae Sung is an engineering student living with his parents in Korea. They reconnect by chance through Facebook, and begin Skyping.
The characters are often young and, unlike their parents, have spent most of their lives in the west; as a result, they can be prone to romantic and sometimes deluded ideas about their birthplaces. Increasingly, these films play with these ideas, teasing the fantasy of a reunion that delivers complete self-actualisation only to subvert it. The birth parents are reluctant or gone altogether; people discover not a sense of home, but a host of new complexes about their identities.
Though Past Lives is less overtly concerned with family and identity, the stories of Nora and Hae Sung reveal another much used conceit of the fantasy of the prodigal return: that the person who leaves is the one filled with motion, the real possessor of plot, while those left behind remain static, lying in wait to issue a welcome. When a young Nora announces to her classmates that she is leaving to pursue her ambition of winning the Nobel prize for literature, no South Koreans have won it.
Then again, some themes persist. The child’s mother remains in China, and has not seen her son in years. The film’s final moments tease a reunion between mother and child – he is shown getting on a plane – but demurs from showing it. Instead, we see his mother at her new home, humming as she looks wistfully out on to the horizon, listening to the song that we first see her dancing to, 25 years earlier, as a young shop girl – in those intervening years, she has lived many lives.
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