Past Lives is the astonishingly assured film debut by Korean playwright, and now director, Celine Song. As a director myself, I have been begging for more material like this either to make or merely to witness: intimate, moving, a contained drama which can unfold in a few rooms and selected locations. Some films amongst those on the Academy list are, in musical terms at least, symphonic in breadth: Oppenheimer for example. Others such as Past Lives, present themselves as what is fundamentally a Chamber Piece, but like great chamber music of the past such as Beethoven or Schubert’s late quartets, one can achieve greatness with comparatively small resources. (Continuing the musical analogy, Maestro emerges as not much more than a broken and incomplete overture).
This minor masterpiece is the story of lost and unrequited love, stretching over three decades and moving from downtown Seoul to Upstate New York. Childhood friends Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) are seen at school, exploring in a local park, returning home from school and climbing the endless steps back to their respective city apartments. They laugh and grumble at each other with no hint that their friendship will soon be torn apart when Nora’s mother decides that the family shall relocate to America. They may not realise it at the time, but this forced parting leaves them both bereft. Then, in two concurrent twelve year time steps, we follow their progress individually over the next quarter century. Their childhood bonding underpins each of their lives and remains unaffected by, in one case a committed marriage, in the other a flaky girlfriend.
Past Lives is not just a love story, it touches on matters of spirituality and religious beliefs, in this case raising the prospect of reincarnation and consequently the possibility of multiple lives lived. Here there are no heroes or villains or victims, just subtle combinations of all and more within our three central characters (the third being Nora’s Jewish and lately acquired husband). It is astonishing how completely Song manages to pull us into the principal story of these two young people, and how destiny pulls them apart; although their spiritual bond not only remains intact, but strengthens even as they leave each other forever. This acorn of a film turns into a mighty oak tree, aided by two magical performances by Lee and Yoo. Decades of love and longing between them are conveyed in a single look, and I guarantee many pockets will be full of damp tissues and handkerchiefs on their owners journeys home.
On a technical level, Song has a clear authority both in her framing of images, but also in the wonderful use of discreet tracking shots, particularly in the New York sequences. She also cleverly traps the handsome Yoo in a series of claustrophobic interiors, both in his Korean home town, as well as the hotel rooms he occupies in New York when he eventually flies to see his one true love. Outside, in the expansive vistas of New York anything seems possible, in the small interior stifling rooms an escape into any kind of emotional freedom is a cruel fantasy and clearly unattainable.
Our prayers for a romantic reconciliation are dashed long before an ending which literally ends in tears, but at the film’s conclusion we are not left with a feeling of hopelessness, far from it. Rather that love can stand the test of time, and far-flung continents, and inconvenient marriages, and triumph as an invisible but unstoppable force of nature.
Nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay for Celine Song at the 2024 Academy Awards, Past Lives is available to Stream on Showtime, and its partners, including Paramount+. For more information, please visit www.a24films.com.
Photos courtesy of A24 Films.
