An awkward but intimate trio (a Korean man and woman facing each other, a white man on the woman’s other side) are drinking at a bar in NYC in the wee hours of the morning. An observing woman wonders what their story is…how are they related to each other? It’s a beautiful storyteller’s moment captured by writer-director Celine Song to set the stage in her self-assured and lovingly rendered debut, Past Lives.
At age twelve, Nora and Hae-Song share their first date in Seoul before she and her family emigrate to Canada. Twelve years later, they reunite through social media and begin to video-chat regularly about their lives and dreams, but eventually realize the futility of wanting anything more when she is in NYC trying to make it as a playwright and he’s about to study abroad in China. And again, another twelve years later, he finally comes to NYC to see her, where they wax poetically about all the what ifs…their relationships (she’s married…he’s in the midst of a pause with his long-term girlfriend), and destiny.
Celine Song’s film is one big, beautiful ellipsis…where she invites her audience to wonder not only about the characters on screen (played with great subtly by Greta Lee and Teo Yoo), but also about our own lives, and the lives of others…even about strangers sitting across the bar at 3am in the morning.
For a film whose action is mostly hinged on dialogue and voice-over, Song liberally uses classical visual cues (the morning sun breaking through an open window, curtains gently fluttering in a breeze, trains rattling across bridges, or the million speckled lights of an unfathomably large metropolis at night) to let us wonder and wander between the lines, at the things and events and feelings left off-screen…unsaid. Finely chosen but casual details…from movie posters in a parent’s office…to side-table settings at a Montauk artist’s retreat…to chill bluesy-rock songs playing softly from other rooms…to the drinks and food friends gather around at their favorite haunt in Seoul…you could take any chosen scene, luxuriate in the every-day-ness of it, and create the whole lives of the characters we barely get to know in the background of Nora and Hae-song’s worlds.
The emotions and thoughts and discussions elicited from Past Lives contain multitudes. In our introspection and questions, we fill in the blanks. We craft our stories.
And Song has crafted a timeless one here. Wonderful. Nuanced. Lovely. Melancholy. I can’t say enough nice things about it. See it, feel it, talk about it…as soon as you can.
The Schleicher Spin 