Writing Analysis
“Past Lives” is a Love Letter to Ordinary Lives
A woman finds herself at a bar with her childhood love and her husband. The former flew fourteen hours from Seoul, South Korea, where they’d fallen in love two decades ago, to visit her. The latter has created a home with her in New York City.
The woman, playwright Celine Song, went on to float the idea with friends. Was this love triangle too ordinary to write about? The spark stuck. Her friends wanted more.
Eventually, Song went on to pen a screenplay that was picked up by both CJ Entertainment (the Paramount of South Korea) and A24. The resulting movie is, according to Slate, “2023’s first great movie.”
“Past Lives” revolves around the Korean concept of inyeon: human connection, or the idea that some people are connected through intangible forces. The movie focuses on a particular school of thought about how our current inyeon might arise due to connections in our past lives. According to superstition, main character Nora (Greta Lee) must have eight thousand past lives with Arthur (John Magaro). That’s why, in this life, they’re married. But Nora can’t help looking past into her current life, back to Seoul and the boy she left behind, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo).
Apparently he can’t stop thinking about her either. After Nora and Hae Sung find each other through Facebook, then Skype, he finally visits her in New York. Sitting at the bar with Nora and her husband, he asks, in Korean, “If this was a past life, doesn’t that mean we’re together in the future already?”
The movie is called “Past Lives,” but it just as easily have been called “Ordinary Lives.”
If this was a Hollywood movie, there’d be an urgent and exciting inciting incident to throw Hae Sung into Nora’s path. Maybe a wedding for a mutual connection forces them to reconnect. Maybe an impending middle school reunion sparks curiosity between them.
Instead, Nora is just having another catch up with her mom over the phone when she starts casually looking up old connections on Facebook. Nothing in particular prompts her to think of Hae Sung — it’s not like the person she was looking up before him was another former boyfriend, or a mutual connection — but she does.
If this was a Hollywood movie, we’d get a high-stakes reason for their “friendship breakup” after days and days of catching up via Skype. Maybe she’s on the cusp of a producing a career-making play and needs all the time she can to focus. Maybe some major failure wipes her out, prompting her to drop everything to salvage her career.
Instead, Nora makes a quiet decision offscreen and relays it to Hae Sung in scene: she calls him to say she can no longer talk. She needs to take her writing seriously to prove it was worth emigrating twice (once to Canada, then to New York City). It’s not like this stopped her from talking to him earlier, but with a writing residency coming up, maybe she wanted to write in peace.
If this was a Hollywood movie, there’d be a grand confrontation. Maybe there’s an explosive fight. Maybe Arthur says those hackneyed words, “Is it him, or me?” If we’re following the tropes of an idealistic romance, Nora would choose the man who makes her heart leap, Hae Sung. If we want a journey-back-home story, maybe Nora would kiss Hae Sung but immediately regret it, curling herself into Arthur’s forgiving arms.
Instead, they go out for dinner and drinks on Hae Sung’s last night and part ways when Hae Sung grabs a cab to the airport. Hae Sung and Arthur are so civil it hurts them to like each other. Both assure each other and Nora that they understand: Arthur understands their need to catch up, Hae Sung understands Arthur is the right man for Nora, and Nora assures both, without having to say the words, that she loves them. She doesn’t kiss either of them in the final scene.
“Past Lives” is pregnant with possibilities that rarely manifest. I felt perpetually in suspension, as if the whole movie was an incubation. Nora’s work serves as a metaphor. We don’t see endpoints like graduation and opening night. We see her writing residency — literally an incubator — and a glimpse of her casting for an unnamed play.
The few endpoints are punctuated by Arthur. We don’t get a first kiss between the childhood sweethearts, but we witness the first kiss between Nora and Arthur. We don’t see career milestones for Nora, but we see Arthur signing books for his new hit, “Boner.”
Both of the men call themselves ordinary and unremarkable. Hae Sung explains he couldn’t get married because he’s “an ordinary man” with “an ordinary income.” With friends he’s just another bro, at home he’s just a normal son, at school he’s just another student, and in the labor force he’s just another white-collar worker.
In a bout of insecurity, Arthur notes that he might not be the one married to Nora if she had met some other guy at the same residency who had read all the same books, watched all the same movies, and happened to reside in New York. (All of these factors are somewhat redundant: it wouldn’t have been hard to find a writer from NYC with the same tastes if they’re one of the five people who got into the same residency.)
Yet, the movie is magnetic. Hae Sung lights up almost only when he’s talking to Nora. When Skype-ing, they lean into their screens as if doing so will narrow the ocean between them. They don’t even talk about much: “How’s work,” “How’s New York,” “Do you still cry often.” Arthur, while relaying his insecurities, nails why his meet-cute with Nora was miraculous: it could have been so many other men, but it wasn’t. It was him.
As Director Song said in a Q&A after A24’s limited screening, “The movie lived and died on the actor’s faces.” Her genius was in setting up the story and getting out of the way, letting the camera capture every twitch, every dart of the eye. The actors conveys so much without speaking, evoking Lovesong, another movie by a female director Korean descent about all the things we leave unsaid. Said another way, Song captured life as it happens.
The main contribution of “Past Lives” to our cinemas is that it is utterly believable. The premise is at once humble and incandescent. Each quiet moment was like a bated breath, full of the sense that something extraordinary was about to happen.
“Past Lives” is a love letter to ordinary lives, the quiet ways in which the quotidian can be extraordinary.
