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Two recent outstanding and very different films present some interesting common themes. The Blue Caftan is the story of a Moroccan tailor (Halim) and his wife (Mina)—and a third (Youssef), a young apprentice who stirs the tailor's long repressed homosexual desires. Past Lives is about a Korean playwright (Nora) whose comfortable and happy relationship with her American husband (Arthur) in New York is shaken by the re-emergence of a past love (Hae Sung) whom she first knew when they were children growing up in Seoul. Both films deal beautifully but distinctly with what might happen to love when a threatening third appears.
Past Lives plays on our expectations of the trope of the third. The film starts by showing us the three protagonists sitting in a bar. Off screen, the voices of a man and a woman try to guess what the relationship between the Asian man and woman and the white American man might be, the couple's dialogue reflecting the viewer's own curiosity. The white man seems left out, there is chemistry between the other two … Who is the husband? Who is the lover? Will it all end with the wife leaving a sad husband for a happy life with her lover?
Similarly in The Blue Caftan, we might surmise that Halim, who has tried to suppress his homosexual desires his whole life, will leave his wife for the man with whom he falls in love. But his journey towards fulfilment explores the breadth of love and loyalty in ways we may not have guessed.
In both films, we have an established married couple challenged by an object suffused with fantasy. The third is full of wanting and desire, full of projection. The threatened partnerships in contrast, though often happy and playful, are also imbued with the prosaic, with work and shopping and, in The Blue Caftan, with illness. Arthur's own words in Past Lives sum up this contrast:
I was just thinking about what a good story this is. I just can't compete. Childhood sweethearts who reconnect twenty years later only to realise they were