The First Great Film of 2023: Past Lives

 

"Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future, 

And time future contained in time past." (1)

At the end of Celine Song's remarkable film Past Lives, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) wonders if he and Na, now Nora, Young (Greta Lee, who deserves a Best Actress nomination right now) are together in a future at this very moment. A running thread throughout the story is very much about the roads we go down, the relationships we start but never quite conclude, and the paths not taken. Song takes the Korean term inyeon/인연 as the thematic underpinning that provides layer upon layer of tension between the possibilities of the past faded into the actuality of the present. 

Inyeon is translated as "encounter" but it has more nuance than that might imply(2). As Nora explains it to her husband Arthur (a beautifully sensitive John Magaro), the word relies on context; in a past life, two people may have brushed sleeves in passing, but something's been established such that over successive lives, they become more closely connected (Nora alludes to 8,000 inyeon). Korean Buddhism is known as being unique as having taken a holistic approach to Buddhism as it was incorporated into Korea over centuries. Its emphasis on interpenetration renders the doctrine of dependent origination somehow more intimate and less theoretical. As represented by Nora and Hae Sung, the concept is practically tangible. It seems to infuse the film with a palpable sense that we are only living one version of our lives. 

The film begins with a shot of an Asian couple at a bar with an American guy to the side. A couple in voiceover wonder what the relationship is. Is she with the American or are the two Asians tourists and he's their tour guide? No, not at four o'clock in the morning...

We find ourselves in Seoul twenty-four years prior and meet Na Young and Hae Sung walking home from school having a kind of tiff; Hae Sung got a better mark on a paper and this upset Na Young who always gets the high marks. From the outset, we witness a special friendship and a budding first love. This, however, cannot last as Na Young's parents have decided to emigrate to Canada. Her farewells to her girlfriends at school are animated and warm; she and Hae Sung walk in silence to the stairwell that leads to her home. Na Young stares - not vacantly, there's depth there but not easily read - mutely at Hae Sung until he finally says "bye" and she says the same. 

From here, we see their lives unfold in alternating scenes. Shortly after Na Young's arrival in Canada, we find ourselves twelve years later in university pursuing playwriting in New York and Skyping with her mother about people they've looked up on Facebook. She finds that "kid I had a crush on" was actually looking for her on her dad's Facebook page. By now, Hae Sung has been fulfilling his military service and is on track to pursue engineering. She DM's him and they begin their friendship anew, but it's now obviously charged with something more. This isn't a film about seething emotions; there is a gentleness the like of which is rarely seen onscreen but the expectation that informs and infuses their Skype sessions is handled deftly and delicately until Na Young tells Hae Sung that she needs to take a break; she needs to concentrate on her work and he needs to tend to his. She attempts to soothe him saying that she'll be back soon.

That's not quite the case as she winds up on writing retreat in Montauk where she meets Arthur and the two quickly become a couple. Another twelve years pass and Arthur and Nora are married. Both Lee and Magaro convey a lived-in, honest relationship. It's as if they really have known each other for years and the love between them reads as genuine and considerably deep and solid. That said, we also learn that Hae Sung has contacted Nora and said he's coming to New York for vacation. 

By this time, Hae Sung has become a professional engineer who has broken up with his girlfriend (he tells Nora something a little different) and his mates in Seoul give him a slightly hard time about going to New York; he's obviously going to see his childhood crush, however much he denies it (they don't let him play dumb!)

We see Hae Sung waiting anxiously. He's filled out and grown up and Nora, or for Hae Sung's sake, Na Young, takes his measure and her face as it was two decades ago, is somewhat hard to read until it isn't and she is genuinely happy to see him. In their catching up, Hae Sung tells Na Young that he and his girlfriend are on hiatus. They've discussed marriage, but he says he's a mediocre engineer making an average salary and she deserves better. Na Young talks about her marriage and without stating it, conveys how much she and Arthur are a solid couple. She even mentions that they do fight ("we don't fuck around") but you know how rich their marriage is; it's obvious, too, that Hae Sung appreciates it but wonders about the paths he and Na Young have taken. 

A day of sight seeing done, Nora arrives home and tells Arthur with a nod, "he came to see me", but Arthur takes it in stride. He tells Nora that there's no way he would deny her seeing her childhood sweetheart and you sense his appreciation of the poignance of all that entails. Additionally, Arthur isn't threatened by the situation. They gently joke about it in bed and it's there that Arthur wonders if another guy had come to that writer's retreat; would Nora have wound up with him as her husband? She replies that they were meant to be as they are. She adds that she loves him. To which he says, he sometimes can't believe it. He adds, "You make my world so much bigger and I'm wondering if I do the same for you?" I suspect so, Arthur; Nora's world is pretty expansive, but I don't think she'd be with you if there wasn't that on both sides.

Hae Sung has another day or so left and spends his last night visiting Arthur and Nora. He speaks about as much English as Arthur does Korean but you can tell Arthur is glad they've met. At dinner, Nora is genuinely surprised that she and Arthur haven't visited the Statue of Liberty; the entire dinner scene is played lightly as is the wee hours setting at the bar where the off-screen couples introduced to our players. It is here where the conversation between Hae Sung and Na Young grows more philosophical, poetic, and richly wistful and affectionate. 

It is here that the what-ifs come into sharp relief, the questions about what would have happened if Na Young had stayed in Korea or what were their past lives like. What were they like to each other? Nora wonders if their life together was some political union. Hae Sung opines that they were a fractious king and queen. There is a throughline of a kind of - not regret - but of a kind of nostalgia for what they were as children and for the past that was not. 

Nora excuses herself and Hae Sung apologizes to Arthur for his and Nora's speaking in Korean. Arthur assures Hae Sung it's okay and we are soon enough back at the apartment where Nora tells Arthur she's going to wait with Hae Sung for his Uber. It is here that Lee and Yoo transcend an already transcendent film. The two stand together wordlessly, looking at each other, body language shifting and barely containing something very much like desire. The past twenty-four years of missing and coming together and parting wells up in wordless wonder. The Uber arrives in what feels like a knick of time. 

He wonders if they're experiencing a past life right then to which Nora replies she doesn't know and Hae Sung says him, neither. The camera tracks Nora's walk back to Arthur waiting for her on their stoop and she walks into his arms sobbing. We cut to dawn coming over New York with Hae Sung in his Uber. Roll credits.

"What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. " (1)

It's been a long time since a gem of this nature has graced screens. I was taken back to Linklater's Before Sunrise, Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, and even Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation, all masterworks of unrequited romantic tension but all of which speak more eloquently about our relationship to love and what it means to love deeply and how that takes different forms.

There's a passage in a letter from Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé that captures the overall sense and poetry of the film: "Will you believe me, when I tell you that the sight of a woman who passed me in a quiet street in Rouen so disturbed me, that thereafter I could see almost nothing, concentrate on nothing? ...

    "Reading something, resting, looking out - yes, I could be contented with everything if only it were entirely mine again, and did not keep discharging itself into longing." (3)

It's as if Rilke felt his own inyeon with the sight of that woman and similarly, it's as if each encounter between Hae Sung and Na Young was "discharged into longing."

Song's writing is so genuine, real, and intimate, it's difficult to imagine this film not working but it soars with Lee and Yoo's performances, but with Lee's in particular as we're with her more. While that's so, Hae Sung's arc is filled in by his absence; we can feel what he's feeling the more time we spend with Nora.

I don't have adequate words for what Song has accomplished here. A playwright and a respected one at that, her directorial choices in this first film of hers were, frankly perfect. The cinematography by Shabier Kirchner, best known for his work on Steve McQueen's Small Axes from 2020 for the BBC, is stunning but not overpowering. I think it matches Lance Acord's work on the above mentioned Lost in Translation; rich ranges of values and compositions that frame and support the characters with no fussy camera tricks. The visual economy is its own kind of poetry.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that the score by Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen (two members of the Grizzly Bear trio out of Brooklyn) is itself a character in the film, going beyond the need for merely providing atmosphere and actually working as part of the sound design; ambient music to the fullest extent but, particularly toward the end, increasingly melodic.

I really want to linger over the work Greta Lee did here, though. The best actors are those whose faces can reveal the inner lives of the characters they bring to life, but I can't recall the last time I saw someone whose interior is at once opaque and opening, often within the same shot. What she's done here is on par with Blanchett, though not from, say, Tár, but more from Carol; there is a range in the way both actresses can withhold the significance of a word but unveil something immensely profound and moving in doing so. It's in the eyes, I think, but Lee is so present. She's present to her scene partners, to the camera, to us. It's a stunning achievement that, again, we see too little of.

As I'd mentioned writing about Holofcener's You Hurt My Feelings, you (well, I) sometimes don't realize how starved you, uh, I am for a genuine well-written dramatic story without histrionics or melodrama (let alone, loud explosions and adult children in tights). That last actually is something of a slam at where we are in the theatrical movie-going experience. No, there's nothing wrong with loud, popular tentpole films, but the more of those that get made, the fewer of films like Past Lives are we likely to see at the multiplex.

Admittedly, I've not seen everything released this year, but this really does feel like the first great film of the year. It's not just that it's a sincere, multilayered tale, well-acted and filmed. It's much more than that. It's art in the best sense; I found it transformative and evocative of, well, Eliot on the one hand, and Rilke on the other. That doesn't happen with most films.

Notes

1. Eliot, T.S. "Burnt Norton". Four Quartets. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. San Diego, New York, London. 1971.   

2. A little more on inyeon.

From the entry at Wiktionary:

the ties between two people over the course of their lives; one's connection with certain people or things; 첫사랑과의 인연

cheotsarang-gwa-ui inyeon

• relationship with one's first love over the course of one's life
• predestined relationship; fate; destiny
• (Buddhism) karmic affinity
• chain of cause and effect

3. From Briefe aus den Jahren, 1907-1914, 301-2, quoted in Duino Elegies, W.W. Norton and Company, 1967, p. 91, translated by J.B. Leishman and Steven Spender.