By Nick Taylor
With the Gotham Awards dropping tomorrow, I decided to cap off this little series with a rewatch, one of the year’s most popular independent films that, to my surprise, did not have a full review at The Film Experience . . . . until NOW!! That’s right folks, we’re talking about Celine Song’s Past Lives. Nominated in Best Feature, Breakthrough Director, and Lead Performance for Greta Lee, this sleeper hit has made about as strong of an impact as an early-year release could hope to achieve. I was fully seduced by it reputation in the weeks leading up to its release, and though I was completely besotted with Past Lives on first watch (to the point of showering it with attention across my own halfway-through-the-year ballot), I’ve never quite shaken the concern I succumbed to hype rather than fully engaging with it. This was an ideal opportunity to give the film another shot, and seeing it again helped to further solidify my feelings on this tricky flick . . . .
Rather than centering on a set of characters, Past Lives orients itself around a relationship. In the year of our lord 2000, twelve year old classmates Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim) and Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) are best friends. They compete for the top placement in class, walk home from school together, and are very emotionally attached to each other. One day Na Young’s mother asks her daughter if she likes any boys from class, and sets up a date in the park between Na Young and Hae Sung before her family immigrates to Toronto. Twelve years later Na Young (Greta Lee) is living in New York and going by the name Nora Moon. She stumbles onto a Facebook post from Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) asking about her, and the two reconnect over internet video calls before breaking apart once again, this time of their own volition. Another twelve years pass and Hae Sung takes a trip to New York to visit Nora, while her husband Arthur (John Magaro) waits in the wings, anticipating what might happen when these old friends finally see each other again.
Song based Past Lives on her own experiences, reflecting heavily on her life after her own encounter with a childhood friend and introducing him to her husband. Acting as a translator for two men who so clearly reminded her of distinct avenues of her life and her history made Song very aware of her more tenuous attachments to her South Korean heritage, her immigrant status, her embrace of America as a country and via her marriage to a white man. Her retellings of this section of her life in interviews are fascinating, and it speaks to her good instincts as a dramatist that she doesn’t set out to recreate the culminating night at the bar exactly as she described it. Questions of nationality, ambition, conformity, and authenticity percolate within the characters, sometimes brought up in conversation and sometimes hanging in the space between their words and glances. Refreshingly, Hae Sung and Arthur do not register as pointed stand-ins for two life paths Nora could take. Past Lives never flattens its characters into emblems of anything, even if they’re clearly conscious of those dynamics.
Conversely, I wonder about a larger sense of scope Past Lives either fails to conjure in its character’s lives or doesn’t seem interested in evoking. By design, Hae Sung and Nora and Arthur are not elaborately written, given spark through emotional depth, purposeful dialogue, and directorial finesse more than rich biographical detail. This works for 12 year olds discovering their emotions right as the thing they’ve realized about themselves is yanked away from further exploration. But for adults who are supposed to have changed and grown and remained fundamentally stunted in key ways between their seismic interactions, the text of their lives can sometimes feel sparse to the point of vagueness.
Past Lives lacks either the formal rigor or textured singularities to allow the audience greater insight into its scenario. Nora and Arthur’s careers as writers get perfunctory explorations. I don’t think we ever learn what Hae Sung’s job is, let alone what he’s been up to since he last saw Nora aside from his military service and his having an ex-girlfriend. Hell, how long did they spend video chatting in 2012? Is this a speed-run of sudden codependency or weeks, months of leaning on each other and catching up before they split apart? Their digital reconnection is affecting, but the intensity and meaning of their emotions are blunted for Song’s temporal opacity.
These aren’t details I always demand from my cinema, but it does stand out when so much of Past Lives feels divorced from contextualizations that would deepen this already-poignant setup. We don’t need to watch Claude Rains on the clock in The Passionate Friends to grasp how his occupation as a banker informs his outlook on love, especially with everything David Lean’s direction and script do to help us understand a more fraught dynamic in a very specific cultural setup. Song broadly captures the tenor of each chapter of her character’s lives, but I wanted more sense of what else might be informing their actions, why it mattered that Nora had made her life in New York aside from the fact that it wasn’t South Korea.
Despite these complaints, I remain utterly moved by the third, hour-long chapter of Past Lives, where the jumbled, semi-articulate desires and anxieties of the protagonists are faced head-on when Nora and Hae Sung finally meet again in person. Using the sparseness of the dialogue while filling up all the empty space and roving glances between them, Song and her actors capture the poignant, tangled-up feelings that come from meeting a long-absent person who once meant the world to you, how those feelings are as much about who you are and who you used to be as the other person. They’re equally deft at showing how adults carry their childhood selves with them beyond being simply “stunted” or stuck, even if those elements are wrapped up in how much they’ve grown and changed. Deft editing and burnished cinematography do their own work to help us grasp the connectedness as well as the awkwardness percolating between these characters, even if some key setups are better-staged than others. Every shot and cut placement in Hae Sung and Nora's reunion, to give one example, is magnificently staged.
It helps tremendously that Song coaxes such deft performances from her actors. Of the leads, Lee perhaps has the more difficult task, finding gradations of withholding and expressiveness in the character most fundamentally bent on keeping her feelings in check. I love how she conveys a sense of remove around topics she doesn’t want or doesn’t know how to address. Then again, perhaps Yoo’s finely-etched emotionality is so impressively performed that it only looks easier. He makes Hae Sung’s pining into something heartfelt, projecting a full-grown adult’s awareness of his childishly immature attraction without reading as pathetic. Arthur does read as pathetic, and Magaro embraces his racialized self-pity with the same sensitivity his co-stars achieve. The soft, late-night conversation where he narrativizes his anxieties about losing Nora is such a liberal white guy expulsion of a thought he finds ugly. All three actors do remarkable jobs of studying each other and examining their own reactions, conjuring deep reservoirs of emotion within underplayed registers. Lee’s nomination at the Gothams is richly deserved, and I hope all three of them are recognized at the Indie Spirits.
I reacted best to Past Lives as a story of two people reconciling with past and potential versions of themselves, who they could have been and the lives they could have made, rather than a story of would-be-lovers bent every which way by destiny. I still don’t connect to it as profoundly as others have this season, but I admire it greatly for every ephemeral thing it gets right about how we relate to people from our pasts, and to the millions of versions of ourselves that always coexist with the person we are now. Lord knows I would love if the First Feature critics prizes don’t fall into lockstep, especially considering how many great debuts we’ve had in 2023. But whatever else happens this season, I look forward to seeing just how far Past Lives can go.
Past Lives is available to rent on most major streaming platforms.