First-time director Celine Song, at the time a playwright living in New York City, never in her wildest dreams could’ve imagined that she’d be sitting at a bar in East Village translating a conversation between her American husband and her Korean childhood sweetheart. But there she was, an interlocutor in the presence of her past and her present.
Song’s surreal experience in the bar that night and her story as a twice immigrant, once from Korea to Canada and then from Canada to the United States, inspired the script that would become her feature length debut film — Past Lives.
Past Lives follows Nora Moon/Na Young (played by Greta Lee, Sisters) and Hae Sung (played by Teo Yoo, Decision to Leave) in three acts. In the first act, Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) and Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim) are Jung hakgyo or middle school sweethearts. At just 12 years old, neither of the two really know why they like each other; “he’s manly,” Na Young proclaims. They walk home together from school every day, and when Na Young cries as she often does on the way, Hae Sung is her shoulder to cry on. Their courtship has an abrupt ending when Na Young’s family chooses to emigrate. Na Young knows she’s headed towards a future where she’ll be a Nobel Prize winner, Hae Sung left behind and hurt. All they can muster on her last day is a cold goodbye.
Twelve years later, Na Young, who now goes by Nora Moon, settles into life in New York City as a college student away from her parents and sister in Canada. Nora no longer yearns for a Nobel Prize, instead her sights have turned towards a Pulitzer Prize. On a random night, she decides to look up Hae Sung on Facebook to find out that he’s been searching for her too. They reconnect as if time nor space engulfed the 6.8k mile gap between them. They try a long-distance friendship, if you can call it that, filled with longing and desire in their unsaid words. But as much as they want it to, it just doesn’t work.
Another 12 years pass by as the last act arrives. Nora is now married to a writer, Arthur (played by John Magaro, First Cow), whom she met at an artist residency. It’s a marriage of convenience as much as anything else; Arthur shared some of her interests, splitting rent made more sense in the uber-expensive East Village, and a quick nuptial expedited the acquisition of Nora’s permanent residency status. Hae Sung, on the other hand, finds himself at the end of a failed relationship; his idyllic conditions for marriage were not met by his girlfriend. So he decides to finally undertake the daunting 13-hour flight from Seoul to New York City for vacation. The movie unfolds from here.
Since I’ve spoiled enough about Past Lives’ plot, I will talk a little bit about how it made me feel. Few movies get to the core of the human experience quite like this one. Themes of what it means to love and to lose, to adjust and adapt, to become and to endure are all explored in the film’s 106 minute run time. Celine Song in her first film both wrote a simple but yet compelling story and then directed the hell of it.
In a Q&A session after the screening ended, Song mentioned that she doesn’t want to prescribe a feeling to the audience, just that they leave with something tangible. She also said she had to convince the movie’s producers she was the perfect director of the film. She couldn’t have been more right.
Past Lives is a distinctly Korean story, but it also sparks an introspection that anyone who watches it would have no choice but to come away with. It will evoke emotions that perhaps one never knew they had or provide clarity about the way in which their life has played out; it certainly did for me. This is what I want from a movie: when I walk out after the credits roll, I want to leave a wiser person than when I entered the theater.
The performances of Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro, and the young Seung Ah Moon and Seung Min Yim were pitch perfect. Song spoke about how the movie calls for long takes, often without much in the way of dialogue. It relies on the facial expressions and chemistry of the actors to pull it off and at each turn they do.
The movie is also shot exquisitely. It made me both want to move to New York City and Seoul with their beautiful city- and landscapes. And the film’s climax, the penultimate scene, is the most memorable tracking shot I’ve seen in a long time. You’ll know when you see it and if you’re anything like me, you’ll be holding on to your breath until it ends.
More than anything, Past Lives touched me at an emotional and spiritual level. It introduced in-yun to me. In-yun is a word in Korean that means something akin to “fate” or “destiny”. Song revealed that it’s a word that derives from Eastern philosophy and that there’s a similar word in other Asian cultures. In the movie, Nora tells Arthur about it one night at the residency; Koreans believe that true soulmates, in-yun, have had over 8,000 touches in a past life in some form in order for them to reach their current moment. It could be in the form of a relationship, a friendship, two strangers brushing past each other in a crowded space, or two birds sitting near each other on a perch. In Western culture, Song told us in the Q&A, we think of destiny as something we have to go get. Conversely, in-yun comes to you, wherever you may be.
In a time when things seem bleak (*points to literally everything*), Past Lives gave me a reason to be hopeful of what is to come. As much as we want to impose our will on our life and the world around us, all we can truly do is take what comes and accept it. I find that sentiment to be beautiful.
I usually ask if you’ll watch the movie I just reviewed. Today, I’m begging…pleading with you to go see Past Lives this weekend. So comment below what theater you’re planning to see it in.