By the end, you’re probably wondering how well they do.ĭistance is key to the meditative magic of Past Lives. Perhaps you, too, started the sequence merely interested in how the characters know one another. Song is holding the audience at arm’s length, intensifying the mystery. As the scene goes on, they point out how close the three of them seem and how they respond to one another-all while Song’s camera zooms slowly in on Nora. One suggests that Nora and Hae Sung are tourists, and Arthur “their American friend.” Another guesses that they’re colleagues. These unseen commentators wonder how the two men are related to the woman seated in between. The audience doesn’t hear their conversation instead, they listen to several onlookers who are watching the trio. Past Lives opens at a bar, where Nora, Hae Sung, and Arthur have gathered for a drink. The result is a confident entry in the canon of great romances-one that expands the emotional scope of what a love story can be. “The rhythm has to be perfect.” Her script is defined not just by the lines her actors deliver but by the deliberate silences between them, generating a pulse that expresses the ineffable. “I think every film is music, at its heart,” she told me when we met in Los Angeles last month. In both its pathos and its displays of affection, the film is assuredly told, largely because Song thought of herself as a conductor and her story as a composition.
Yet Past Lives is less about renewing a relationship than about exhuming it and dissecting the possibilities it once possessed.
It’s the kind of film that could have easily collapsed under the weight of its own sentimentality. By then, she has a husband, Arthur (John Magaro)-and that’s the least of the changes in both of their lives.īuoyed by a trifecta of fine-tuned performances, the movie sensitively tracks how Nora and Hae Sung have been shaped by their divergent paths, their connection tenuous yet precious still. They reconnect online as adults but fall out of touch again until Hae Sung visits Nora in New York, 24 years after the last time they saw each other in person. The film- this year’s Sundance darling-follows Nora (played by Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), best friends in their youth who go their separate ways when Nora’s family moves from South Korea to Canada. Song’s sweeping romance, Past Lives, spans decades and crosses continents as it depicts a woman reconnecting with her childhood sweetheart, but it deploys a delicate rhythm of absence, distance, and silence. For the playwright turned first-time filmmaker Celine Song, the same holds true in the telling of a love story. This article contains spoilers for Past Lives.
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