Ivan Radford | On 07, Jan 2024

Director: Celine Song
Cast: Greta Lee, John Magaro, Teo Yoo
Certificate: 12

“You make my life so much bigger. I wonder if I do the same for you.” That’s Arthur (John Magaro) and Nora (Greta Lee) reflecting on their marriage in bed one night. It’s one of countless profound lines in a film that beautifully understands the nature of human relationships and connections.

We begin in Seoul in 2000, when Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) and Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim) begin to form a bond in their early teens – but it’s a short-lived attachment as Na Young’s family emigrate to Canada, and so we catch up with her in 2012. She’s living in New York and has changed her name to Nora. She stumbles upon Hae Sung on Facebook, who is still in South Korea and planning to move to China. With Nora focused on her writing, they share another brief encounter over video calls, only to move on with their lives once more. Another 12 years later, Nora is married to Arthur, after they met on a writer’s retreat. Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) travels to New York to visit Nora and they reconnect.

What follows is a heart-achingly delicate study of love, identity and how the two almost imperceptibly melt into each other. Celine Song begins with a brief glimpse of the three adults at a bar, then patiently builds up to that moment, letting the layers gently fold on top of each other with remarkable confidence and skill. Nora explains early on to Arthur the concept of “inyeon”, the notion that people can be tied together by fate, because of what was between them in their past lives. “If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8,000 layers of inyeon over 8,000 lifetimes,” she explains.

There’s a striking clarity to how Song unpicks that idea, both encompassing intangible romance and practical reality. Song delves into the nuances of the migrant experience to explore the way that your sense of self can at once change and still retain a cultural truth from your home country. In a digital age, the past can also vividly be preserved, accessed and perhaps treasured through social media, drawing it more closely to the present in a way that be both painful and enticing. The challenges and hope of a long-distance relationship also come with their unique strain of wondering, blending regret and dreams in a tangled web of what-ifs.

Song knows the myriad ways that this situation might play out, and so do her characters – and, in so many ways, that’s the beauty of this muddled mess of emotions. Hae Sung rides into it with, at least on some level, the awareness of his noble, handsome role in this story – the heartbroken fabled sweetheart who, perhaps, was destined to be with his apparent soulmate. Arthur, meanwhile, is thoughtfully portrayed as someone who is fearful of that possibility yet also accepting of the importance of this unknown, unfulfilled past love in Nora’s life – whether they should be together or not, it’s part of who she is. And between them, Nora is at once comfortable and uncomfortable, torn between the allure of nostalgia and memory and the grounded happiness of her very real present life.

All these things coalesce with breathtaking subtlety, as Nora code-switches between languages and identities, both consciously and unconsciously. Where another screenwriter might see their ideals and unrequited feelings clash in a heated confrontation, Song’s smartest move is to let them simmer, as the tensions can’t be resolved simply; she allows them to co-exist in parallel, recognising that everyone at any given moment is both the sum of who they are and who they haven’t become, who they were and who they might go on to be. In a script ringing with semi-autobiographical authenticity, Song understands that inherently tied to relationships is the way that people’s understanding of what love is grows with them over time, both shaping their identity and being shaped by it.

The result is an astonishingly expansive playground for her cast to inhabit and they are all note-perfect at every second, delivering three of the most mature and lived-in performances you’ll see this year. There’s an irresistible magnetic force between Nora and Hae Sung, even as there’s an unspoken intimacy between Nora and Arthur, and these connections spark and dim simultaneously as they interact with each other in different combinations. Shot by DoP Shabier Kirchner with an exquisite blend of texture, light and shadow, there’s a fleeting sense to each moment, as they unfold with an unpredictable, raw depth – and of the gap left when one person leaves the frame to go to the bathroom. Together, the ensemble invite us to wonder as we observe their poignant triangle, while giving room for not just bittersweet reflection and jealousy but also warmth and gratitude. Perhaps only Richard Linklater or Wong Kar-wai have previously reached such heights of exploring love on the big screen – the fact that this is Celine Song’s feature debut marks her out as one of the most accomplished and fully formed directors in recent memory. Past Lives is a gorgeous, expansive meditation on how our past and present build to make our future selves. It’s one of those movies that makes your life bigger by watching it. And, fittingly, leaves you wondering what else Celine Song will go on to achieve.

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