Past Lives — Celine Song’s heartwarming and heartbreaking directorial debut
A review for the movie Past Lives written and directed by Celine Song.
How many of us have ever wondered what life could have been if we had done things differently? If we hadn’t broken up with that guy? Or if we had stayed with that other one? No one knows the truthful answer to life’s “what ifs” but at some point, we all have questioned our choices and rambled about other paths we could have taken.
In her brilliant directorial debut, Celine Song takes on the challenge of reflecting upon concepts such as love and destiny but also the many lives we live and the ones we don’t ‘The roads not taken, the lives not led, the futile luxury of regret’ as Peter Bradshaw accurately wrote in The Guardian. Exploring these ideas may be tricky as you can easily fall into the temptation of doing something overly dramatic but Celine managed to write a truthful and beautiful story. It’s simple, direct and mostly subtle in how it addresses complex themes such as emigration, growing up, friendship, marriage, regret, disappointment but also acceptance.
In the opening scene, the camera gazes at a trio sitting in a bar in New York while two anonymous voices try to guess what is the relationship between these people. Are they siblings, colleagues or lovers? We never see who is talking but together with them, we assume the roles of voyeurs peeking at an intimate scenario.
The three strangers are South Korean Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), Korean-Canadian migrant Nora (Greta Lee), and her American husband Arthur (John Magaro). At a certain point, Nora breaks the fourth wall and looks directly at the camera with enigmatic eyes and a smirky smile. This moment sets the tone for this melancholy tale that follows the life of Hae Sung and Nora since they were kids in Korea until they met in New York City twenty-four years after they were last together. In this period, we see their reality unfold in between reunions, separations, and continents.
Curiously, the inspiration behind it was Celine Song’s own history who lived a similar moment when her childhood sweetheart came from Korea to see her and she ended up with him and her husband in a bar. That pivotal moment in her life had so many layers that she said she could only explain it through a movie (I thank this moment as much as I thank the driver with whom the creator of Beef argued in traffic! It gave us amazing television and cinematic stories).
From the bar, we go back in time twenty-four years to see the first of the three acts in which the story unfolds and meet young Hae Sung and Seung Ah Moon (she only assumes the name Nora after emigrating), two best friends living a sort of platonic and innocent first love in Korea. They even go on a sort of date sponsored and controlled by their mothers. However, life changed when Seung parents decided to emigrate, and when parting ways they lost track of each other.
The second act takes place twelve years later when Nora tracks Hae Sung down through social media only to find out he has already been looking for her. They reconnect in an awkwardly amazing video call on Skype full of embarrassed laughs and shyness. While they get closer, they also realize how much separates them, how distant their reality is, and how incompatible their future seems. Scared by the idea and afraid of getting stuck on something that would hold her back, Nora decides they should stop talking and move on. She later meets Arthur at a literary retreat and they get together.
For the third and final act, we move forward another twelve years. Nora is living in New York with her now husband and they are preparing to meet Hae Sung who came to visit her twenty-four years after they last saw each other in Korea. And oh boy, I was not prepared to embark on that journey. From his arrival until his last minutes in the city, they go through so many emotions with such subtlety and simplicity that is impossible not to get your own heart broken. The most beautiful thing about them is they lived so many lives in those years but somehow there is a part of them that still belongs together. After all, we are the stories we lived but also the ones we didn’t, and sometimes those are the ones that stay with us the most, hovering around to remind us of the paths we didn’t take.
And just as I was imagining the final moment when they would kiss and have their happily-ever-after ending just like Hollywood and Disney taught us, they had something else prepared. It was then that I understood that sometimes the happy ending is about moving on and getting closer. This heartbreaking ending left me in tears (I’m sorry to say but if you were able to see this without shedding a single tear, you have no heart!). It was excruciatingly sad and tremendously beautiful.
When I was watching it, I was also thinking about that dear place we all have for childhood romance. It symbolizes purity and simplicity and we tend to romanticize it because it’s the victory of love against time and all the hard things it brings. But that’s the beautiful thing about Past Lives, it was faithful to its core and able to beautifully deconstruct romantic ideas of destiny in love stories. The first words we hear in the movie’s trailer are ‘There’s a word in Korean “in-yun” which means providence or fate’ the karmic bringing together people who were lovers in past lives and Celine Song plays with that concept to deconstruct the idea while simultaneously look at it from a perspective of happiness. “In-yun” can also be about friendship and the idea of two friends reconnecting and having another chance to see each other. I’m still not over it so I have to say that I’m still unable to look at it from that perspective but she’s right. Sometimes we have to be grateful for what we lived and accept that moving on is also part of life.
The characters were emotionally mature enough to accept the “what if” but also the realities of their lives. Celine tried to show three people doing the best they could, unlike in many movies. For example, Nora’s husband Arthur holds his insecurities to welcome his wife’s childhood sweetheart and meet him “It would be so much easier if Arthur was a jerk” or “if Hae Sung was possessive and came to New York to ruin Nora’s life. Or if you felt Nora wasn’t loved and she behaved immaturely.” That could easily be the plot of a cheap soap opera where this love triangle could make 300 episodes. But the writer and director wanted something different “How can we find drama in three people trying to do their best not to hurt each other, even though the situation is impossible?”
The script is delicate and sophisticated and the actors played an immense role in how they were able to convey such big and contradictory emotions through a simple dialogue. Nothing is big but everything is honest and truthful and that is what makes it connect with so many people — it resonates with their reality. Everyone praised Greta Lee and rightly so but Teo Yoo’s performance got stuck with me on how he was able to perfectly transmit such vulnerability, shyness, and fear and at the same time care. I just wanted to give him a big hug.
To make it even more truthful, Song established some rules among them to help build tension for key moments. Greta Lee (Nora) and Teo Yoo (Hae Sung) could not touch each other while rehearsing so when they filmed the scene when they meet for the first in New York the raw energy and the nervousness were there. Also, Teo Yoo and John Magaro didn’t meet in person until they filmed the scene in the script when they were introduced by Nora. In the last scene, the actors didn’t know how much time would the uber take to arrive.
Past Lives is heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same time. It can destroy you but also build you. In some interviews, the director and actors say that many people cry when meeting them at random places while opening up about their stories of love and loss. What more can someone who makes art expect than to know it touched and changed somebody’s life? Mission accomplished.
