Past Lives
Directed by Celine Song
Running time: 1hr46 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Teo Yoo, Greta Lee and John Magaro in Past Lives
I first saw Past Lives at an early morning screening at the Berlinale, a little hung over, having directly travelled from a trip to Johannesburg a couple of days before. The trip had been both lovely and disorienting, marked by the nostalgia of familiarity and the remove of change, that slightly offhanded embrace you get from a former home that you still know, but that doesn’t know you anymore. Anyone whose life has been sharply divided between far-apart places knows the feeling. Korean-Canadian-American writer-director Celine Song certainly does, and her wistful, shimmering debut feature is so richly suffused with it, and its attendant calm and sorrow, that it made me cry a little bit that morning, in an echo-y Berlin multiplex.
Making people cry — tired, under-the-weather people especially — is easy enough. Sticking with them is harder. But Past Lives has stuck these past few months: when I think of it, I’m hit with the same soft, lapping wave of sadness that got me the first time, the same pang of attachment to a life, and a self, that hasn’t deserted me exactly, but now seems distant and strange. Song’s self-inspired protagonist Nora (Greta Lee) hasn’t lived in Seoul since her family emigrated two decades before, and she doesn’t pine for it: She has chosen New York as her home, and built a full, happy life there with her American husband Arthur (John Magaro). But there’s still a small, empty space in her, a gap for what was left behind, which is unexpectedly filled when her childhood crush Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) visits her in New York, and past and present lives collide.
What ensues has conveniently been termed a love triangle, but that’s not precisely it. Nora has affection for Hae Sung, but they aren’t bound by attraction as much as they are by separation: as they walk and talk through the streets, bars and ferries of a city famed for uniting strangers, they explore the shape their lives might have taken without thousands of miles between them. For Nora, at least, she’s gained as much as she’s lost; for the more solitary, haunted Hae Sung, the reunion merely places the hollow parts of his heart in relief.
Song, who rose to fame as a playwright, explores these personal crevices and contrasts with a wise, writerly curiosity that never feels static or stage-oriented. Urban geography steers the relationships here as much as interior directives do. Nor does Past Lives pull you toward a particular desired pairing: we want the best for all three principals here, which is to say we want them at peace with themselves, unplagued by ghosts of the past and parallel maybe-futures, whoever they wind up with. But most of all, Song’s gentle little heart-crusher leaves us thinking of ourselves, of the people, places and personalities we’ve shed en route to wherever it is we are now, and which ones are worth keeping close.
PAST LIVES (2023) Written by Celine Song | Shot by Shabier Kirchner | Edited by Keith Fraase
In cinemas now