Film Review: "Past Lives"
Celine Song's debut feature film is a remarkable and devastating portrait of lost loves, missed connections, and foreclosed futures.
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There are some friendships, some emotional bonds, that stay with you for your entire life, shaping (and sometimes distorting) how you view the world and your place in it. The last couple of years have seen a number of extraordinary films tackle this issue, including Of An Age (which I reviewed right here at Omnivorous) as well as Celine Song’s more recent Past Lives. Unfolding over the course of decades, the latter traces the strange yet poignant relationship between Nora Moon (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). It’s the type of film that takes its time but, when it finally delivers the emotional knockout, it hits you with the strength of a hurricane.
After a brief introduction showing three people sitting in a bar while unseen observers speculate on the nature of their relationship, the film flashes back several decades in the past. Na Young and Hae Sung are friends and childhood sweethearts in Seoul, where they share a close, but also competitive, bond. Na Young, however, abruptly moves to Toronto with her family, leaving Hae Sung bereft not just by her departure but also by the fact that she never really told him she was leaving. The two reconnect over a decade later, when Na Young–now going by the name Nora–is an aspiring playwright and Hae Sung is an engineer. Thus a pattern is set for their lives, wherein they come into one another’s lives, only to pass out again. They both engage in other relationships, with Nora even marrying a likable writer named Arthur (John Magaro), but the pull between them is too much to resist, right up to the very end.
Past Lives is a slow burn, and it gradually draws you into the emotional and physical world of these characters. Shorn of big emotional displays or “visual oomph,” it relies instead on the subtly magnetic performances of Greta Lee and Teo Yoo. At times Lee’s Nora can seem almost standoffish and icy, but it’s clear from the slight movements of her face that there is a world of desire and sadness hidden beneath. She is a person filled with yearning–for awards, for success, for love, for life–yet one gets the feeling that she is one of those people who is also destined to be disappointed, whose reach always exceeds her grasp. Even her marriage to Arthur feels a bit forced, never quite able to escape the shadow of its green card origins.
For Yoo’s Hae Sung, on the other hand, there is almost no sublimation. His life hasn’t turned out quite as well as he would have liked it to–he doesn’t seem to particularly like his job, and he is currently separated from his girlfriend as they each try to figure out what they want. For better and for worse, Nora seems to be the lodestar that guides his life, much to the amusement of his friends. Teo Yoo ably captures the ache of longing, the yearning for a past that never was and a future that, most likely, never will be. Just one look into his eyes, and you feel like you are looking into the depths of his weary and rather sad soul.
There is, I think, something also potent and profoundly devastating about the story of Past Lives. Most of us, I’m sure, have at least one person in our lives with whom we have shared a special, perhaps even a romantic, connection, though for one reason or another we never really got to connect with them in the ways we might have wished. For better and worse, those are the connections that stay with us, tempting and tantalizing us with the allure of the road not taken. If, for Hae Sung, Nora is the ultimate what-might-have-been, for Nora Hae Sung seems to be something a bit more intangible, a connection, perhaps to the homeland she left behind and to which she retains only the frailest of links.
Near the end of the film, they stand waiting for Hae Sung’s Uber, and it’s a moment that is at once pregnant with infinite possibilities and yet, at the same time, we know already that all of those potential pasts, presents, and futures have been foreclosed upon, at least in this timeline. Nora and Hae Sung have each gone their own ways and forged their own lives independent of the other. They might have these occasional interludes in which they reconnect, but they’ll only ever be that: interludes. The full enormity of this seems to hit Nora as she arrives back at her apartment, where the ever-loyal Arthur stands waiting for her. When she breaks down into gut-wrenching sobs, it’s clear that she’s mourning all of those other temporalities, the versions of herself that she can never recapture. Confronted with the enormity of such a loss, who wouldn’t find themselves emotionally utterly bereft?
I’ll admit that I’m invariably drawn to films like this one, dramas about loves that can never be fulfilled and futures that can never be realized. Perhaps this is because I have a naturally melancholy temperament, or perhaps it’s because, like these two characters, I have a love in my past who I continue to pine for at times, even as I long ago accepted and acknowledged that I could never have him and am now with the man I know to be the love of my life. There are some things in the past that simply leave their hooks in you for years, no matter how much you try to escape and no matter how far away you move. Perhaps it’s because, as the film proposes through its repeated evocation of the Buddhist concept known as In-Yun, in which two people will continue to meet through all of their numerous lives together, I have so many connections with those I love that I can’t help but wonder if something ties us together across the many ages of this world.
Whatever the reason, by the time I finished Past Lives I knew that, like the characters, I would be forever moved by what Song has given us.