If there’s one thing that you will take away from a Q&A with Celine Song it is that she is someone who understands people and the reasons why we choose to stay or leave relationships at various points in our lives. Though her debut movie, Past Lives, is about the reunion of two childhood friends, it goes beyond the formulaic love triangle plot and evolves into a meditation on relationships within our everyday lives and at pivotal transitional moments.
When asked what she has learned from making Past Lives, Song says it was the revelation that her capacity for empathy and love was more than she had ever given herself credit for. While this may be her first time directing, she is the playwright for Endlings and The Seagull on The Sims 4, and a screenwriter on the Prime Video series Wheel of Time. Her ability to convey “extraordinary emotions in ordinary circumstances,” in her words, is translated effortlessly by each of the main characters in Past Lives, Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), and Arthur (John Magaro).
When talking about the making of the film, Song wrote the script in both English and Hangul and gave directions bilingually to the actors using their native language. In this way, when Nora and Hae Sung revert to Korean when they are together (despite Nora’s decreased proficiency of her first language) and how they both pivot to English with Arthur regardless of his attempts to speak in Korean to them, Song portrays the roles these two men have in Nora’s life. One is in the past. The other is in the present. Neither of these two points will converge.
Even if you feel secure in the path and the people you choose to walk with in life, Song is empathetic to the emotional journey of making these choices and the space needed to grieve unmet possibilities. It’s no surprise that the film is inspired by a scene within Song’s own life, when she found herself talking to both her childhood sweetheart and her husband in different languages—engaging with them within different cultural spaces— while the three of them were hanging out at a bar in the East Village. Past Lives is a fitting title not only in relation to Hae Sung and Nora’s relationship, but to Nora and her husband, Arthur, as well. Both couples play out their own versions of alternate histories and possible futures through conversation. What if I stayed? What if I took that chance? Any relationship with mileage in it has grappled with this philosophical thought experiment and the higher the mileage the more chances for possible paths to emerge.
What keeps the film balanced is the story’s willingness to dive into the contradictions of its characters and of time itself. As Song points out, “How twelve years can be both forever and two minutes.” There are the twelve year time skips, from Nora and Hae Sung as kids to them and Arthur as young adults to these three in middle age. There is the frustration of communicating through FaceTime across different time zones when one is starting the day while the other is ending. Then the thrill and awkwardness of meeting someone whether it is for the first time or after many years again and again. Or as the writer-director puts it “How time and space can collapse (when seeing someone) and it feels so much bigger when you stop to think of it.”
The tragedy and the triumph of Past Lives is it encourages the viewer to reflect on their own pasts – the places, people, and parts of ourselves that we’ve had to leave behind in order to become who we are now. Nora’s Mom rationalizes to Hae Sung’s Mom the sacrifices their family will make immigrating from Korea to Canada by saying, “When you leave something behind, you gain something too.” Part of growing older is learning to live with that loss and being content with what you have gained from your choices. Watch Past Lives now playing in select cities, nationwide June 23.
