Past Lives
When do you know a relationship is real? A shared glance that lingers a little too long, when you can’t stop talking to each other, when you do something together that feels more special than usual or when domesticity has set in and you’re lying next to your partner discussing dinner plans? In Celine Song’s brilliant “Past Lives,” each quiet brush with love is a spark that could and sometimes does ignite into something more. The film examines love at different stages from budding elementary school crushes to adulthood’s mistaken certainty. It’s the kind of movie that allows for introspection as much as it entertains, following two characters who show us how relationships fully realized or otherwise shape our lives.
As a child in South Korea, Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) develops feelings for another boy in her class, Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim). Just as their relationship begins, her parents decide to move to Canada. The two childhood friends lose touch as they continue on with their lives in different countries. Twelve years later, Nora (Greta Lee), now an aspiring playwright in New York City; and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), an engineering student back in Seoul who never stopped thinking about his first love; reconnect over Facebook. Soon enough, the video calls take over their lives Skype sessions lasting hours on end, time differences be damned. But with no indication that either one of them is willing to upend their early careers for the sake of this fleeting romance across continents, the video calls stop coming. Nora and Hae Sung live another 12 years before they find each other again, by then he’s visiting New York City for work and brings up all the feelings they thought they had left behind.
Song’s feature debut is storytelling at its finest. A playwright before she moved into filmmaking, her focus here is visually and narratively tight, making everything around Nora and Hae Sung feel like it could be melting into the background when they’re together. There is a special connection between these two, even if it never got to take root in the physical world. Every unsent email, late night video call and excited smile charts the course of their relationship. Characters speak to each other not with dramatic declarations but with authentic conversations that reveal tender feelings, Song’s script is full of dialogue for them.
Shabier Kirchner frames “Past Lives” tenderly, giving us close ups of Nora’s face and Hae Sung’s expressive reactions as richly as any line of dialogue. During their long-delayed reunion, the pair move from basking in the glow of magic hour on Brooklyn’s waterfront to sunny trips on the ferry to street lit walks in the East Village with an ease that belies how little time has actually passed since we last saw them. It’s a winking contrast to Seoul, where as children Hae Sung and Na Young took winding routes home through neighborhoods built among hills and played among sleek modern sculptures in parks. But no matter where they meet up, there is no mistaking that these two are connected, whenever they’re together, the camera makes it seem like nothing else matters quite as much.
Though at its heart it is a love story through and through, “Past Lives” moves beyond yearning for romance and burning questions about why we fall for whom we do. For Song, this film was also an opportunity to express her own feelings about what it means to be an immigrant.
Before she left her home country, Nora’s mom justifies the couple’s decision to move abroad “If you leave something behind, you gain something, too.” It is a concept that follows Nora through her life, as she ends up in New York City and married to a kindhearted writer named Arthur (John Magaro) after different experiences. But it does mean leaving the world of her childhood, and today she barely speaks Korean. Describing to her husband how she felt upon seeing a man who was her crush as a girl, Nora says, “I feel so not Korean when I’m with him” suggesting an insecurity about how she relates to her own culture.
Song makes Nora and Hae Sung’s shared background a key aspect of “Past Lives,” like a second connection point beyond their shared interests. He represents the life not lived because she moved away that something left behind for something else to be gained. Their common language is one her American spouse can’t keep up with; functionally speaking, they can have a private conversation even when he’s sitting at the bar with them. But sharing doesn’t mean feeling the same way about things, hence In-Yun’s recurring appearance as encounters with people from past lives that determine connections in this life. It’s something Nora laughs off with Arthur at their first meeting during a writers’ retreat but that Hae Sung takes seriously while thinking over his long-deferred visit to New York; they are, as the film shows literally, on two different paths; if anything still remains at heart between them kids who met eyes for the first time.
Lee and Yoo rise to the challenge much of the film sets for Nora and Hae Sung with an effortlessness born of familiarity. Their characters’ desire to talk is palpable, their meandering conversations ring true. They have never looked at each other before but Lee and Yoo make it seem as if there is a long history between their characters just with the way they look at each other. Their faces show the polite smile of someone trying to hold back tears after one heavy sigh breaks them loose to mourn what might have been, what was never theirs, and a childhood that grows more distant with every passing year.
This mix of nostalgia, love, and regret is what makes “Past Lives” so powerful and beautiful. The film brings to mind other movies like Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love,” Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise,” or David Lean’s “The Passionate Friends,” but it belongs to Song so completely how she wraps the settings around her characters, how carefully she builds their relationship over time, how quickly she returns that excited feeling back into their conversations after years of silence. It takes a romantic view of if-thens enjoying them like sandcastles washed away by time. We can revel in our past lives’ memories while accepting that some things of childhood were left behind, some roads will not be taken and relationships were never meant for us.
For More Movies Visit Putlocker.