'Past Lives' is one of the best films you'll see all year. Here's why you can't miss it.
It’s not every night you go out to the bar and come home with a movie.
But that’s roughly what happened to Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song, whose stunning directorial debut, “Past Lives,” is loosely based on her life.
In the opening moments of the romantic drama (in theaters now nationwide), a playwright named Nora (Greta Lee) grabs a nightcap with her husband, Arthur (John Magaro), and childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who is visiting Nora from South Korea. Yearning and discomfort abound as the three make small talk, and onlookers quietly theorize about the nature of their relationship.
The scene is inspired by a similar experience Song had with her American husband, writer Justin Kuritzkes, and a Korean friend with whom she reconnected after many years. As she translated in English and Korean, she could feel people’s eyes on them.
“Sitting there in the bar, something did pass through me, like, ‘Maybe there is something worth telling about this,’ ” Song says. “What if instead of dismissing their gaze, I really looked back and said: ‘Hey, this is actually the story. It’s not a massively dramatic story, but it is a big story because it’s about life.’ “
‘Past Lives’ is a romance that helps us cope with ‘the trauma of living’
"Past Lives," which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January, is one of the most widely acclaimed movies of the year (97% positive reviews on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes). Already tipped as an early Oscar contender, the film is distributed by A24, which backed last year's best picture winner, "Everything Everywhere All at Once."
Split into three distinct chapters, the movie begins in Seoul, South Korea, in the late 1990s as young Nora (Seung Ah Moon) tells grade school crush Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim) that her family is moving to Canada, leaving him brokenhearted. Twelve years later, adult Nora (Lee) and Hae Sung (Yoo) find each other on Facebook and try to maintain a long-distance relationship over Skype, which eventually fizzles out.
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Another 12 years pass, and Nora is living in New York with now-husband Arthur when she learns that Hae Sung is coming to the city for vacation. Playing tourist together, Nora feels an intense connection not only with Hae Sung but with her Korean identity, and she wonders what might’ve been had she never left her home country.
The movie hinges on the concept of “inyeon,” a Korean word for “destiny” or “fate,” the idea that every human interaction – no matter how deep or fleeting – was preordained in a previous life. In actuality, when Song’s friend came to New York, her feelings were only platonic. But Song is quick to point out that inyeon doesn’t just mean romantic love.
“My feeling was, ‘This is a really incredible level of inyeon.’ That’s really what I was feeling,” Song says. “He knew me as a 12-year-old, and because it was hard to keep up our friendship in adulthood, the conception of me and him never evolved. On the other hand, my American husband doesn’t know anything about the 12-year-old because he’s never met (her). He’s seen photos, but it’s not really real to him. So that was primarily the feeling, like: ‘Wow. Neither of them know what the other person knows.’ “
When Lee first read “Past Lives,” she was astounded by the ways Song subverted a conventional love triangle story. “It’s so much bigger than that,” she says. “There are moments that feel cosmic.”
The Korean-American actress, best known for Netflix’s “Russian Doll,” believes it’s only human to wonder what might have been. It’s why she thinks this movie resonates so strongly with audiences.
That question “is so universal and unanswerable. It’s like an endless quest to understand why and how our lives end up to be what they are,” Lee says. “That’s why I like movies like this. It helps with the trauma of living.”
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First-time director Celine Song found her 'calling' behind the camera
Like Nora, Song lived in South Korea until she was 12, when her family moved to Ontario, Canada. She received a Master of Fine Arts in playwriting from New York’s Columbia University in 2014 and primarily worked in theater before “Past Lives,” save for a staff-writing gig on Amazon’s “Wheel of Time” in 2021. But she always saw this particular story as a film rather than a stage play, given its scope across decades and continents.
“It really felt like, if I’m doing a (narrative) where it’s three points in these people’s lives, it should be presented in a way where they can quite physically embody the 12 years passing of time,” Song says.
To help capture more authentic reactions, Song purposefully kept her three main actors apart until their characters met on screen. She also gave her cast a wide swath of reference points, ranging from the 1981 dramedy “My Dinner with Andre” to Marina Abramovi?’s 2010 performance “The Artist is Present.”
“I’m still deeply suspicious that this could be her first time (directing). It was nonsensical,” Lee jokes. “She’s so decisive and clear and unburdened by extraneous things, in terms of her vision. She absolutely led the charge the entire duration of the shoot.”
Song has already written her next script, which like “Past Lives,” will be produced by A24. Ultimately, she feels that making this movie helped her find clarity ? not in how she relates to her past but in the way she envisions her future.
“I’m pretty comfortable with my relationship to different parts of myself that are different cultures and different languages,” Song says. “When you’re younger, you’re less at peace with it, but I think now I’m feeling very at peace with it.
“I think what I really discovered in this is that I want to make movies. I found my love and my calling and my dream and what my plan is for the rest of my life.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Past Lives': Celine Song, Greta Lee talk 2023's most acclaimed movie
