jjambongfilm

[jjambongfilm]

Past Lives..

Code switching – the practice of switching one’s language or dialect depending on context - is often used in diasporic cinema to explore cultural identity, depicting the shifting insider and outsider roles of the characters as they feel embraced by one language and alienated by another. 

Take Return to Seoul, a film about French-Korean adoptee Freddie who goes back to her birth nation and attempts to find her biological family. Freddie doesn’t speak Korean, an immediate barrier between her and her birth father. It’s her aunt and the little English she speaks that allows Freddie to communicate with him, translating and mistranslating her words to humorous and poignant effect. In this way, language barriers are presented not as a source of conflict but as an opportunity for empathy - by speaking in an unfamiliar language you make yourself vulnerable in order to understand one another and bring the outsider in.

Past Lives is another diasporic Korean film released this year to critical acclaim. The story centres around Nora, a Korean girl who immigrates to Canada at 12 years of age. As an adult studying in NYC, she reconnects with childhood sweetheart Haesung, a grainy image on skype, her accent markedly different to the child she was 12 years ago. 

Like many diaspora, English is the language she had to learn in order to assimilate, to work and study, whilst her native language Korean is reserved for the people closest to her. It’s odd then that Nora largely dismisses her white husband Arthur’s attempts to learn Korean. When he asks her something in Korean, she replies in English - she neither encourages his efforts nor helps him improve. It’s clear that Nora likes to keep Arthur as an outsider, not fully letting him into her world. 

When Haesung arrives in New York and meets Arthur, they attempt to communicate by speaking in each other’s language; Haesung in broken English, Arthur in broken Korean. It’s probably one of the best scenes in the film - two people making an effort to understand each other for the sake of the woman they both love, yet we feel none of the same empathy from Nora.

After Nora and Haesung go on a day trip to do touristy stuff around New York, it’s revealed that she’s never been to the statue of Liberty with Arthur. ‘You should take your husband,’ says Haesung in Korean. Nora doesn’t bother translating this to Arthur. What could have been a genuine moment of connection between the three ends up feeling like they’re just being mean to the white guy, which only gets worse as the film goes on.

The deliberate exclusion of the white man through language does not de-centre the white gaze but in fact centres it completely. Arthur gets undoubtedly the best lines of the film - he was written to garner the audience’s sympathy which is evident on film review platform Letterboxd where many thought that he was the best character. Yes, he shows tenderness and understanding of how Nora feels towards Haesung, and his attempts to speak Korean are sweet. But what does it say about a Korean-American film when the white supporting actor plays the most memorable character?

It really feels like Past Lives could have leveraged its bilingual nature to impart greater humanity and vulnerability to Nora and flesh out her complex cultural identity. In director Celine Song's words it was important that actor Greta Lee (who plays Nora) didn’t improve her Korean for the film in order for her to sound more ‘childlike’, but there’s nothing childlike about the words she uses. When your mother tongue becomes your second language, there’s so many complex ideas that you can’t express, forever tongue-tied, wanting to say something more than mundane niceties but simply not having the language to do so. Yet when Nora speaks Korean to Haesung, she does it with ease, never stumbling over her words. She briefly alludes to her Korean-American friends, but where are they? We basically don’t see her interact with her family as an adult either, we have no idea how she speaks to them or the person she becomes around them. The fact that Nora barely exists outside her relationships to the two men detracts from the emotional intensity of what’s supposed to be a bittersweet farewell of everything that could have been.

‘You dream in a language I can’t understand. There’s like this whole place inside of you where I can’t go.’ says Arthur to Nora. This seems to sum up the film’s stance on code switching - white people get upset when their non-white spouse speaks a different language around them. The use of multiple languages in film has so much potential to show empathy and connection between people from different backgrounds, but Past Lives feels flat due to Nora’s lack of characterisation and empathy, made all the more ironic considering she’s the director’s self-insert.

As a British-Korean bilingual, I’m hungry for good stories about the diaspora that examine how we use language in an interesting way. Let’s hope the next big film does.

[jjambongfilm]

Post-colonial Analysis of The Handmaiden (2016)

A video essay I made last year for a module at uni, really choppy editing cos we had like a week to do it but I had a lot of fun researching and writing it!

Let me know your thoughts about the film and my analysis