"Past Lives": In-Yun Will See You Now
Three decades of longing leaves you happier and sadder than you might think.
An oft-quoted idiom rings true in this directorial debut: “Less is more.” Celine Song’s intimate film Past Lives does more than 90% of movies you will see will less than half of the cinematic magic and added post-production elements many have grown accustomed to.
The rare love story that is both impossibly romantic and crushingly pragmatic follows two people who might be soulmates, even though they have not been in the same city in 24 years. Song modulates the delicate tonal balance of this wise, wistful film perfectly, dividing her narrative into three distinct segments — following the characters at the ages of 12, 24 and 36 — with each passage more moving than the last.
There are three superb performances at the film’s center. Still, none is more radiant than that of Greta Lee, gracefully capturing the spirit of a searching soul who seems to understand things about the nuances of love that are beyond the grasp of the rest of us.
The A24 film’s thoughtful time-jumping romance will draw favorable comparisons to Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, which similarly looked at the evolution of love over the decades from an intelligent, mature perspective.
In Seoul 24 years ago, 12-year-old Nora (Moon Seung-ah) and Hae Sung (Leem Seung-min) are close friends with a crush on one another, but their adolescent stirrings don’t have time to develop: Nora’s family is moving to Toronto. Heartbroken, Hae Sung gives her a cursory goodbye, but their paths are destined to cross again. Cutting to 12 years later, Past Lives finds Hae Sung (still living in South Korea and now played by Teo Yoo) reconnecting with Nora (now a playwright in New York and played by Lee) on Facebook, the two picking up their friendship over Skype. But after a difficult conversation initiated by Nora concerning expectations over where their platonic relationship will go, they fall out of each other’s lives again. Twelve years later, though, they reunite in New York, even though Nora is married to Arthur (John Magaro), a novelist.
Song, herself a playwright, investigates the notion of In-Yun, a Korean concept that argues that our current selves (and the people in our orbit) are merely the most recent version of our past lives. Many love stories touch on fate, chance and a cosmic sense of destiny, but one is hard-pressed to think of any as elegant as Past Lives, which features no fantastical elements. Instead, In-Yun is explored as a philosophical notion, with the central trio debating the merits of having a chain of past lives connecting ourselves to others.
Lee’s beautifully controlled performance anchors the film’s realistic treatment of love. Nora and Hae Sung clearly share a spark, but they never actually become romantically involved — partly because the 24-year-old Nora seems reluctant to pursue it, which is understandable since they’re so far from each other geographically at that point in their lives. (But perhaps there’s more to it than that: subtly, Lee’s enigmatic portrayal suggests that Nora doesn’t want to return to Seoul metaphorically or literally, viewing Hae Sung as part of her past.)
Past Lives never demonizes any of its characters, appreciating that life doesn’t work like the movies, where the people who are supposed to be together inevitably wind up in each other’s arms. It’s a sign of the wit and sophistication of Song’s poetic screenplay that the insecure Arthur admits to Nora that, if their lives were fiction, he would represent the boring husband who kept her away from the man she’s destined to be with. Past Lives smartly examines how compromise, regret, missed opportunities, time and distance affect relationships — and how those invisible factors inform our romantic choices as much as hormones or storybook meet-cutes. Lee and Yoo have a warm, soulful chemistry that indicates that their bond transcends the strictures of a traditional love affair. They seem intertwined since childhood, but maybe they aren’t meant to be together in a conventional sense.
Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen’s lilting, mediative score is as finely calibrated as the film, with piano and guitar offering a lovely counterpoint to the onscreen drama. And rather than forcing a tidy resolution onto these complicated lives, Past Lives instead lands on a generous, poignant finale that honors all the messy emotions that relationships — even the happiest — provoke. No matter what happens with Nora and Hae Sung, they have been irreparably changed from having met. Anyone who falls under the spell of this devastating film will feel similarly altered by the experience.