2023 Catchups: PAST LIVES
Celine Song's sumptuous directorial debut is a heartbreaker.
Is the me at 44 the same as the me at 10? Twenty-two? Thirty-five?
I don’t look quite the same, but you can see a resemblance in old photos. My habits and preoccupations have shifted, but what about my beliefs and values? Do the same things make me laugh or cry? Do I still have passion for the things I did in my youth? What will the answers to these questions be 20 or 40 years down the road?
I think of this most often when I reflect on past relationships. There are people I was extremely close with in my teens and 20s who I haven’t spoken with in years. If I met up with them again, would we pick up where we left off? Would I discover something that I’d left behind that was key to my happiness? Or would we sit awkwardly, totally different people than in our youth, struggling to find something in common?
Those are some of the ideas at play in Celine Song’s directorial debut Past Lives, a perceptive and quietly heartbreaking romance about missed chances and renewed connections, filtered through the lens of immigrant life. This beautiful, thoughtful and emotionally mature drama is one of 2023’s very best films.
Nora is just a child living in Korea when she meets Hae Sung, but the two immediately form a close connection. Shortly after, however, Nora and her family move from Korea to Canada, away from Hae Sung. The film follows them as they reconnect 12 years later and engage in a long-distance relationship. The film then flashes forward 12 more years to find Nora married to a fellow writer and living in New York, and Hae Sung pays a visit, seeing his friend and lifelong crush in the flesh for the first time in a quarter-century.
It’s tempting to dismiss Past Lives as another take on Before Sunset, wrestling with a character reconnecting with the one who got away. And there are certainly thematic similarities to Linklater’s classic. But Past Lives is also something different, a musing about the sacrifices we make for opportunity or what we lose when other people make those changes for us. It’s not just the tension between following our hearts and doing the right thing; it’s about the ways in which the heart might not know what it wants, or in which it wants many things at once.
There’s a way to tell this story that is full of melodrama, hints of betrayal and heart-rending declarations of love, but Song never pursues those paths, instead showing an emotional wisdom that gives the film its bittersweet tone. Nora and Hae-Sung’s relationship as twentysomethings is both intimate and hesitant, with both talking through the night on computer screens but also hedging their bets about whether to pull the trigger and connect in person. Eventually, as often happens, one calls for a break to better understand their feelings; during that time, life presents other options. A dozen years later, they reconnect and the spark is still there, even if circumstances have changed. Rather than take the conventional dramatic route, Past Lives consistently delves into something more emotionally complex. The film never makes Nora’s husband an obstacle or a pouting bad guy – he’s well aware that’s the role most stories would place him in, and even comments on it. Nora is aware of the roiling, competing feelings within her, but Greta Lee calibrates her performance perfectly, mingling the mixture of wistfulness, regret, wisdom and love that swirl within.
Lee and Teo Yoo, who plays Hae Sung, have remarkable chemistry, whether in person or via screens. Their scenes together are playful and romantic, and it’s through Hae Sung that Nora maintains a link to her native country. As Nora’s husband, John Magaro is also wry and compassionate, and the relationship between he and Lee also feels lived-in and real. Hae Sung is Nora’s link to a crucial part of her identity, a part she had to give up when her family moved. Her husband, Arthur, however, fits with who Nora has become, a writer and New Yorker with a routine, goals and vision. The love triangle that develops – although I hesitate to call it that – is less a question of who Nora loves more so much as her wrestling with who she is, who she’s become and how to navigate these various aspects of her identity. Telling the film through an immigrant story gives it a fascinating specificity, but anyone who’s ever loved and lost or thought about the one who got away will identify with all the characters here.
Song’s dialogue is thoughtful and insightful without calling too much attention to itself; even the scene where Arthur talks with self-awareness about his “role” in the story makes sense given that he and Nora are writers and likely converse about narratives. Both Nora and Arthur are shown as committed to their careers – and a big reason Nora embraces her identity as a New Yorker is because she’s working on a play – but I wish the film had given us just a little more shading into their work (also, the film gives us a glimpse of the title of Arthur’s novel, and shame on it for not following up with more about that particular choice).
Song shows a wonderful eye for composition, lingering on the moments of almost-contact between Hae Sung and Nora as they travel New York and finding ways to keep the screen-based conversations visually interesting. There are several long takes that allow the relationship between Nora and Hae Sung or Nora and Arthur to play out in front of us, the actors ever so slightly giving hints about what’s happening under the surface. The film’s final shot, in particular, ends the film on an emotional sledgehammer after keeping us at a distance for so long. It’s also one of the rare films to follow New York tourists and give us a view of familiar city sights from new perspectives.
In the end, I keep returning to the movie’s opening shot, a flash-forward to late in the film, where Hae Sung, Nora and Arthur sit together in a bar as we get a voice over of patrons musing about the relationship between the three. Who is the couple in this threesome? Who is left out? Is there something beneath the surface? The beauty of Past Lives is that when we get to this sequence, the reality is none of those things are quite correct – and all of them, in some way, are. The dynamics are so complex between all three that distilling it to something simple is impossible. Yes, you can say who is in a relationship and how those work. But there’s so much water churning under that bridge that neither they – nor we – can wrap our arms around whose heart belongs to who and when. It’s why Past Lives is one of the most emotionally complex, and best, films of the year.