In a summer dominated by Barbenheimer; explosive, bright, blockbuster movies both highly anticipated and heavily marketed; Past Lives’ ability to rise through to the Oscar spotlight is a testament to the power it holds as a film. Celine Song’s directorial debut film has been praised since its release for its rawness, its cinematic beauty, and its universality in its exploration of the recurring question of what could have been had certain factors of our lives been different. Succinct and cleverly paced, it depicts the lives of two close childhood friends who were separated after the immigration of one from South Korea to Canada. The film follows their long-distance contact to an eventual reunion between Teo Yoo’s character Hae Sung in New York- where Greta Lee’s character Nora now lives with her husband.
From the desaturated melancholia of the grey-blue colour palette to Nora constantly being cinematically captured in reflections, of mirrors and windows and screens, everything about the film intends to permeate the viewer with a deep sense of loneliness. Even the characters of Hae Sung and Nora are captured constantly in liminal spaces; they are depicted together at dawn and twilight, times that are neither night nor day. This depiction is of their connection is unnatural and ambiguous; they see each other through screens, interact in places they do not belong, exist in a space that cannot be categorised or pinpointed. The relationships themselves are often painfully realistic in the most seemingly unsolvable way possible. Nora and Hae Sung’s dialogue is often awkward and stilted. Nora’s husband Arthur expresses his feelings of inadequacy and his acceptance of the sadness he feels that he can never truly connect with her because of their cultural differences. The film ends- spoiler warning- with seemingly nothing having actively changed.
And yet despite this, Celine Song achieves a unique depth to her characters whilst also allowing them to be something for the audience to project on whatever narrative they need to. Hae Sung, when returning to Nora’s life after years of being apart, exists for her as a reminder of what her life could have been in every sense; her life as an immigrant and an attempt to reconcile between multiple cultures she is a part of; her life as a writer and the unreached ambitions she had for herself as a child; her life as a woman married to another, different man. Like all broadly labelled ‘sad’ movies, it allows the audience to feel the emotions of the characters by seeing their own emotions and experiences reflected back.
Past Lives uniqueness on this front, however, is its active refusal to idealise or mythologise the characters and their lives. It is remarkable in its ability to portray cuttingly relatable relationships- realistic, complex, often difficult, simply sad- whilst moving away from the standard contemporary view of modern relationships presented particularly in Western cinema. Modern day films have a tendency to portray relationships that are complicated or difficult at worst, violent, and at best, filled with resentment. Past Lives rejects this completely, summarised by the fact that Nora and Hae Sung are never actually romantically involved, but are linked rather by an emotional, historical bond- an acknowledgement of each other’s value in the world. In one of the final scenes of the film, the two part ways after a moment where the film holds the anticipation of a kiss that never comes. This rejection of the value of relationships tied to sex so commonly seen in film, the removal of overt resentment and conflict despite the unhappiness displayed in the film is integral to what makes it so special, it is a romance film with very little traditional romance in it.
The film does not lean into typical contemporary tropes of what makes something invoke emotion in an audience – it is not particularly dramatic, or suspenseful, nor does it utilise flashy colours or dialogue or fast-paced cinematography to elicit this reaction. The value of the film lies in its rejection of the media zeitgeist that believes that the height of romance lies in providing the audience with something that is considered ‘special’; actors who fit high-level beauty standards, who live beautiful yet often unreachable lives, who’s narratives are stirred with conflict. Instead, Past Lives leans heavily into the mundanity of the human condition. Out of this heavy focus on the mundane, it creates a reverse effect of romance and emphasises that the love humans hold for one another is so great that it gives us the desire to experience each other across multiple realms of time regardless of our simplicity, to experience each other in alternate lives. Exactly the opposite of the nihilistic, isolated narrative we might expect; through its deliberately cold, quiet and wistful exterior, Past Lives glows with hope at its core.
Illustration “Past Lives” By Lydia Kempton