Past livesa film nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, which hits national cinemas this Thursday the 25th, asks its central question in the first seconds, before any image appears on the screen: ” Who are they to each other?” ? the other?”.
Not just who we are, but also who or what we represent to someone in the lives of the people we meet. This is the thesis of the filmmaker's semiautobiographical film Celine song I'll try to research something or maybe respond in the next 100 minutes.
Nora (Greta Lee, from The Morning Show) is someone who is leaving. She is the young woman who emigrated from South Korea to North America as a teenager. Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) is someone who stays. He is the childhood sweetheart that the protagonist leaves behind in Seoul when she moves with her family.
Arthur (John Magaro, from “America's First Cow”), Nora's husband, is the reality and time that comes between them when the two former almost lovers meet again more than 20 years later in the United States.
Nora decides to live in New York, Hae Sung goes to China to learn Mandarin. She is a playwright: she is constantly creating new people, new stories, new roles. He is an engineer: he builds properties out of concrete with a solid foundation. It would be a Korean Eduardo and Mônica if Song's references weren't so heavily cinematic.
“Past Lives” received five Golden Globe nominations. Photo: Jon Pack/Twenty Years Rights/California Films/Disclosure
In order to further develop her thesis, the director and her film assume that her generation in the thirties learned from the now classic contemporary novels Antes do Amanhecer (1995) and Eternal Shine of a Woman Spotless Mind (2004 ) (quoted directly from the script): People are a place, love is a time we spend in them.
However, Past Lives not only joins this pantheon of great films, it takes this theory one step further. Song's work is essentially a millennium novel. Nora and Hae Sung “reconnected” over Facebook after 12 years of separation and began talking almost daily over Skype for months.
Therein lies the idea of these avatars, these virtual versions that we create of ourselves and for the two protagonists this other is that they fall in love with (again): a person on a screen.
What Song and his film ultimately show, however, is that what Nora and Hae Sung are actually seeing is not this online version that we construct on the networks themselves, but rather the person/child/teenager they are 12 Having loved for years before.
Nora and Hae Sung as children in “Past Lives.” Photo: Jin Young Kim/Twenty Years Right/California Films/Disclosure
When an old childhood friend finds us again and adds us on Facebook, the person he sees is not the one we created there, but the one he remembers from his school days: what social networks have allowed to be that different temporal versions of ourselves constantly cross paths through the eyes of others.
And that is what the two protagonists of Past Lives represent to each other. Nora and Hae Sung are essentially two characters who live in different zones at different times in each of their lives.
This is the beautiful theory that Song's film elaborates: There are versions of ourselves that are immortalized in other people. And loving that other person doesn't necessarily mean anything romantic. It means a nostalgia, an affection, a melancholy for someone an “I”, a “self” that no longer exists except in that person.
In this “long journey of decay” that is alive, Nora and Hae Sung represent to each other a past that is also a chimera full of possibilities, potentials and latent versions. It is no coincidence that Arthur associates his Korean “rival” with the dream world of women who only dreams in Korean. Hae Sung is the image on the screen, the dream of what wasn't, full of potential adventures and emotions. Arthur is reality.
Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), Nora (Greta Lee) and Arthur (John Magaro) in “Past Lives.” Photo: Twenty Years Rights/California Films/Disclosure
Song represents this contrast in a visual rhyme in one of the film's most beautiful sequences, in which the two protagonists meet in person for the first time after more than 20 years apart.
They embrace in front of a massive, enclosed concrete statue that resembles and at the same time contrasts with a contemporary sculpture in which Nora and Hae Sung played on their first and only “date” when they were teenagers full of holes and blank spaces of potential and a future that needs to be filled.
And if Greta Lee has received the most praise for playing this mobile Nora, always looking forward and so diverse, constantly filmed in front of the mirror of Shabier Kirchner's photographs, Teo Yoo is the great broken heart of Past Lives.
Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) on a bridge between Korea and New York in “Past Lives.” Photo: Twenty Years Rights/California Films/Disclosure
The face of the actor (actually born in Germany) in this scene of the reunion of the two characters who manages to express at the same time love, joy, nostalgia, pain for a life not lived, a hurt, a despair from which he never wants to escape , a “little death” is one of the big cinema releases of 2023.
However, the many and welldeserved awards and praise for the film are not solely due to its good cast. In her debut film, Celine Song demonstrates a sophistication and ability for visual synthesis that is the envy of many veterans.
In the same reunion sequence, she uses the Brooklyn Bridge in the background to represent the distance between Nora and Hae Sung as they show how different they are from each other; and then immediately frames the (almost) couple in front of the carousel as the romantic tension between them returns to the surface to show that time is actually a flat circle, as reallife detective Rust Cohle pointed out.
Scene from “Past Lives.” Photo: Twenty Years Rights/California Films/Disclosure
And above all, Song, like her playwright Nora, takes her cue from one of 2023's best scripts for “Past Lives.” Right at the beginning, the protagonist's mother states: “If you leave something behind, you also gain something” and this is perhaps the synthesis of the film.
The idea that to grow and develop it is necessary to constantly let go and leave behind little parts of ourselves: invisible skin cells, strands of hair, nail clippings, versions of ourselves, people we love and who are a part of us. Some of these losses hurt more than others.