Past Lives (2023)
dir. Celine Song
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2023 A24
If you’re looking for the most self-assured, quietly transfixing debut feature of the year, look no further than director Celine Song’s contemplative Past Lives. I’m too old to describe her film as being “a vibe,” but that’s exactly what it is. Past Lives is like a series of emotions washing over the audience in waves. Song has taken autobiographical bits and pieces of herself to make an authentic, modern romance that feels hyper-specific to the immigrant experience and yet also universal to the human experience.
Our interconnectivity via the internet has made it possible for ghosts from our past to reemerge. One hundred years ago, if you moved thousands of miles from your home and lost touch with your social circle, that was pretty much it. You likely would never see or hear from those people ever again. Now, however, someone you knew as a child can do some sleuthing on social media profiles and suddenly bring your past careening into your present.
That is, essentially, the whole of Past Lives. The picture focuses on Nora (born Na Young), a South Korean who moves to Canada with her parents when she is twelve years old. When she’s asked by her first crush, Hae Sung, why she’s moving away, the girl who will become Nora in her adoptive homeland answers, “Because Koreans don’t win the Nobel prize for literature.”
When I heard her say this, I assumed she was mimicking something she had heard her parents say. (How many 12-year-olds think about winning a Nobel prize?) We see Nora as an adult, after she has followed her dreams out of Canada to New York City in pursuit of becoming a successful playwright. It’s clear she is ambitious and driven, although she’s refocused her efforts on winning a Tony instead of a Nobel.
Celine Song is also a South Korean immigrant who moved to Canada as a child with her parents. She now lives and works in the States as a playwright, screenwriter, and director. Song structured Past Lives as a triptych. Each time we encounter Nora, at roughly ages 12, 24, and 36, her first love, Hae Sung, makes her take stock of where she is in life and who she wants in her life. In the first segment, Nora is saying goodbye to Hae Sung as she prepares to move continents. In the second, set a dozen years later, she discovers that he is trying to find her through the social media page of her father’s most recent film project.
The last segment, set in the present day, is where we spend the most time with Nora. When she and Hae Sung reconnected the last time, Nora was torn between her ambitious career goals in her new home and this link to the past that makes her wonder what would have happened if she had stayed in South Korea. The insurmountable distance and pain of what might have been becomes too much for Nora, and she tells Hae Sung that she needs to take a break from their budding, Skype-based relationship.
In one scene, she describes her turmoil to Hae Sung as being focused on her career while also spending every other waking moment thinking of him and what her life might have been in Seoul. The break Nora requests turns into twelve years. In the meantime, Nora has gotten married to an American named Arthur, whom she met at a writers’ retreat.
It’s fitting that Nora and Arthur have been married for seven years when Hae Sung reconnects with her. He tells her he is planning a trip to New York and asks if he can see her while he’s in town. The unspoken specter of the seven-year itch is as close as Song ever gets to being explicit about what Nora is contemplating during Hae Sung’s trip. For most of the film, we are at a remove from Nora’s inner workings. Song, who, in addition to directing, wrote the screenplay, leaves us to parse what Nora is thinking and feeling with nothing more than the character’s expressions and body language.
The actor playing Nora, Greta Lee, is superb at layering in subtle nuances with the slightest change in her expression. It’s a wonderfully delicate performance, which is of a piece with the film as a whole. Song, with generous help from Lee, transforms this very specific immigrant experience into a universal one. It might not seem like it in the grand scheme of things, but life is long. The people who enter and exit our lives can number in the thousands. It’s a uniquely human trait to wonder what life might have been like had we stayed here instead of moving there; had we said yes to that second date instead of no; had we focused on love instead of career.
The two other leads in Past Lives add to the story’s simmer while avoiding a full boil. Yoo Teo gives Hae Sung a quiet desperation. In one brief sequence, we see Hae Sung during his compulsory South Korean military service. He describes to Nora how he never stopped thinking about her during this period in his life – not long after the reconnection in their early 20s – and we can see it all over Teo’s face as he eats military rations in the field.
As Arthur, John Magaro – who I discovered in Kelly Reichardt’s utterly charming 2019 film First Cow – evinces the right amount of trust in Nora, with a hint of trepidation just under the surface. Magaro plays Arthur – and Song has written the character – as a fully formed, emotionally mature man. Arthur is secure enough in himself and mature enough as a person to know that anger or pettiness in this situation will be disastrous. At the same time, we can see the concern and trepidation that this long-lost love is having on Arthur. One memorable scene, between Nora and Arthur in bed, makes the suspense of this potential love triangle as tense as any Hitchcock sequence. For the last quarter of the film, it’s an open question as to which way Nora will ultimately sway.
The film opens and (almost) closes with a scene of the three characters catching up at a bar in New York. Really, it’s only two of them who are catching up. Arthur has learned some Korean, but when the two fluent speakers get going, all he can do is stare at his drink. Song quietly, almost imperceptibly, moves her camera to cut Arthur completely out of the frame. It’s not fair to him and there is nothing he can do about it, but fate has thrust this situation on all three characters, and Arthur is helpless to intervene.
Song’s light touch with her camera in the aforementioned scene is as subtle as the most moving image of the whole film. During one of the scenes when we see Nora and Hae Sung as 12-year-olds, the two kids are walking home from school. They come to the point where they split up. On the left side of the frame, Hae Sung continues up the street that the two were moving along together. On the right, Nora begins to climb up a flight of concrete stairs partially painted mint-green.
Like their lives, these two routes will take the characters in wildly different directions. The camera doesn’t show us their ultimate destinations, though, and, as the film conveys, you never know when the two paths will link up again somewhere down the road.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- While I really enjoyed Past Lives and thought it was a beautiful story told beautifully, it didn’t pulverize me like (I think) it intended. Rae looked at me like I was a monster when I confessed this at the end of the screening. She was quite moved by it.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Celine Song won my heart by including a reference to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind within Past Lives. Any time I hear the name Montauk, I will forever and always think of that 2004 Michel Gondry film. It seems Song is right there with me.
- There’s a charming little Skype-conversation montage included at about the halfway point.
- Song features some iconic New York City landmarks in a way that I haven’t seen in a while. She lovingly photographs the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty in one sequence when Nora and Hae Sung get reacquainted in person.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:z
- Rae and I saw this at Alamo Cedars with half-a-dozen or so other people. It was a sleepy afternoon, perfect for a quiet, contemplative movie like this one. Past Lives is currently available only in cinemas.