Programme Notes: Past Lives
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Past Lives Warning: these programme notes may contain spoilers and may be best read after the film How much of someone do we ever get to love? When we’re nice and settled in a relationship, which by definition needs the constant articulation of ‘this is the way I want to love and be loved’, are we sure our love accounts for the entirety of the other person? Is it possible that someone else could love parts of them we know nothing about? Such questions sound needlessly confronting to anyone who doesn’t fancy dredging up long-forgotten love affairs, but these are common anxieties for anyone hyper-analysing their own dating life. Romantic overthinkers are familiar with the classics: ‘What if I’m not the one?’, ‘What if I’m holding them back?’, and the much more crushing, ‘If I didn’t end up with them, how different would their life be?’ These ideas race through Past Lives, the latest A24 film to build unbearable hype since its festival premiere and agonise UK audiences with far-off release dates. In the film, a Korean-Canadian immigrant lives in New York as a playwright, and parses through the what could have been’s of her life in Korea when a childhood close friend pays her a visit. It’s the first contact she’s had with him for twelve years, since they ended a digital situationship they fostered from opposite sides of the world while they were both students. Even that was an oddity; before he reached out online to her they had gone twelve years with no contact since she left Korea as a child. She is Nora (Greta Lee) and he is Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), and somewhere on the periphery is Arthur (John Magaro), Nora’s husband. The delicate surface of Past Lives, the debut film from writer-director Celine Song, conceals multitudes. Under the gentle harmonies of Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen’s score against neatly framed New York backdrops, Nora, Hae Sung, and Arthur probe memory and insecurity with pregnant silences and words one of the three will never understand. Where’s something transient about Past Lives’ beauty; every poignant and intimate moment seems like it would dissipate if you tried to grasp it. The careful conversations, the pleasant sightseeing walks, the shared drinks under warm light all gracefully orbit around a massive, deeply human fear: What if we are not built to love all the parts of someone that need to be loved? What if the person we love is merely all that our love is capable of bringing out in them? There’s a difference between a story having broad appeal and speaking in generalities, and although there’s a universal humanity to the drama, and it will resonate with many cross-cultural experiences, the film is defined by its characters’ Korean-ness. As a child in Korea (played by Moon Seung-ah), Nora’s competitiveness with and affection for Hae Sung (played as a child by Leem Seung-min) is tinged with melancholy – her mother (Ji Hye Yoon) takes pictures of them on a playdate intended to give her daughter fond memories of her last days in Korea. But is she setting her daughter up to mourn a future she was never permitted to live? Playing out largely chronologically, Past Lives doesn’t communicate the act of remembering into its visuals and editing, like the dreamy, snapshot style of Aftersun. Instead, the task of excavating the past happens inside the characters with the nostalgia, confusion, and longing playing out across Greta Lee’s face. Song’s background is in playwriting; the drama lies in the charged space between the actors, telegraphing all the feelings they’ll never be able to say. Massively successful Korean media have been enjoying global reach for years now, with mainstream entertainment resonating with huge audiences. Past Lives joins the nicher club of recent films interested in how being a Korean is redefined by Western societies. Riceboy Sleeps, and Minari (which have both screened at Glasgow Film Festivals) focus on young characters who are unaware of the sacrifices their parents make to guarantee their assimilation. Like the French-language Return To Seoul, Past Lives dramatise the delayed consequences of young women not considering how much change has shaped their lives — and by centring on young women, reveals the differences of both romantic expectations and familial responsibilities between their native and adopted cultures. In many ways, Nora’s newfound/rekindled attraction to Hae Sung isn’t about him. A lot of crushes on people from our pasts are projections, a romantic fantasy about an imagined time in our lives where we think we’d be happier, or at least in different circumstances. If they do love each other, Nora and Hae Sung can only love the idea of each other – the parts of themselves that they feel like went unnurtured and neglected. There’s nothing wrong with that. Song’s film isn’t one of moral instruction – it’s a myth that monogamous relationships can fulfil all our emotional needs, and Past Lives speaks to the heartbreak of realising that truth. There exists another Nora, one that her white, American husband doesn’t get to access by marrying her and sharing her home. At one point, Arthur mournfully notes that whenever Nora sleep-talks in Korean, he’s reminded that there’s a whole side to her that, try as he might, he can never know enough to love. Language opens us up to being vulnerable in ways we thought lost and forgotten, and maybe the only people who can understand our deepest sadness, our most potent yearnings, are not those we decided to spend our lives with – and there’s nothing we can do about it. We must make our peace with loving someone without knowing their totality. Should they ever voice their sorrow about this, what can we do but hold out our arms and let them cry? Rory Doherty Film journalist and critic
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