Published July 5, 2023 at 10:00 a.m.
| Updated July 5, 2023 at 12:01 p.m.
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Courtesy Of A24
Yoo and Lee play childhood sweethearts who reconnect after being separated by an ocean in Song's quietly thought-provoking drama.
When I was 13, Raiders of the Lost Ark rocked my world, and I fell in love with Indiana Jones. But the days when blockbusters thrilled me are gone. Rather than try to recapture the magic last weekend with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, I saw Past Lives, a Berlin International Film Festival Golden Bear nominee that explores the power of nostalgia and how our youthful loves may or may not translate into mature ones. Writer-director Celine Song's debut is currently playing at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier and Merrill's Roxy Cinemas in Burlington.
The deal
Growing up in Seoul, best friends Na Young (Moon Seung-ah) and Hae Sung (Leem Seung-min) are inseparable. But just as romantic feelings blossom between the tweens, Na Young's parents decide to emigrate to Canada.
Twelve years later, Na Young is now Nora (Greta Lee), an aspiring playwright in New York City. When she discovers that Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) has sent her a message, they reconnect online and develop an intense virtual connection. But each of them is strongly rooted, and neither wants to build a new life across the globe.
After 12 more years of silence, Hae Sung reaches out again to Nora, who is now successful in her career and married to writer Arthur (John Magaro). When her childhood sweetheart visits her in New York, will feelings rekindle between them?
Will you like it?
Past Lives is about love and relationships, but it is not a romance. Rather than depicting two people discovering that they were always meant to be together, it asks us to consider the role that chance and contingency play in all human pairings.
When Nora meets her future husband at a writing retreat, she tells him about the Korean concept of in-yun, translating it as "fate" or "providence." Every pairing of two people in this life, she explains, is overdetermined by thousands of smaller encounters they had in their past lives. When Arthur asks if she actually believes in fated mates, she laughs and says invoking in-yun is just a good way to get someone into bed.
Even if romantic destiny does exist, though, perhaps it can disguise itself as chance. In Past Lives, mutual romantic attractions are based on being in the same place at the same time in the right mood, yet the resulting bonds are no less powerful for the role of happenstance.
Immigration is, of course, a radical change of place. Nora describes the girl she was in Korea as another self she had to leave behind. Straddling two languages and cultures, she navigates her chosen life with poised detachment. But we see the regret in her eyes when she interacts with Hae Sung, who still lives in his childhood home in a city that reminds him of her. If she is nostalgic for their relationship, he hasn't stopped yearning for her.
Like Nora, Song has a background in the theater, but she demonstrates fluency in the film medium, using it to draw clear lines between the three portions of Nora's and Hae Sung's lives that we witness.
In the second section, in which the two communicate virtually, their images fill the frame against unfocused backgrounds, suggesting how online interaction dissolves our sense of place. Only the light on their faces gives us a sense of setting. In the Seoul and New York sections, by contrast, the focus deepens, and Nora and Hae Sung sometimes disappear into long shots of the urban landscape. As they explore the places where Nora and Arthur courted — haunts that are foreign to Hae Sung — a subtle pathos gathers, underscored by the tinkling of a nearby carousel.
As dramas go, Past Lives offers limited catharsis. The screenplay is sparse, with no filler or even subtext. As Song said in an interview with Script, "Nobody lies in this movie." The conflict is minimal, too, because the three main characters communicate effectively and behave like responsible adults.
The film feels like a short story told in exquisite vignettes and suffused with wistfulness. While some viewers may be frustrated by the lack of action, others could be reminded of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise trilogy, which puts a similar emphasis on the role of chance in human affairs.
Whether you find Past Lives mesmerizing or not, its portrait of relationships rings true — and could inspire bouts of soul searching. Romance is such a basic ingredient of movies that it's a little radical for one to suggest that we'll never know whether destiny steered us toward a particular person or we just ended up there.
If you like this, try...
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004; Starz, rentable): How do two people know they're "meant" to be together? Why do memories of a romantic connection remain so powerful even after the bond is broken? It's no surprise that the characters of Past Lives watch this Charlie Kaufman-scripted film, which pivots on some of the same painful questions about love and destiny.
Minari (2020; fubo, Plex, Pluto TV, Redbox, tubi, Vudu, rentable): Lee Isaac Chung's Oscar-winning drama explores a different side of the Korean immigrant experience; like Past Lives, though, it's a subtle, moving, beautifully acted film.
In the Mood for Love (2000; Kanopy, Max, rentable): Past Lives may not be a romance, but quiet longing is palpable in the air. The classic example of this kind of cinematic slow burn is Wong Kar-wai's drama about two unhappily married people in 1960s Hong Kong who refuse to act on their mutual attraction.
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Bio:
Margot Harrison is the Associate Editor at Seven Days; she coordinates literary and film coverage. In 2005, she won the John D. Donoghue award for arts criticism from the Vermont Press Association.
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