Past Lives: Lives Unlived, Lives Unremembered

Teo Yoo, Greta Lee and John Magaro in Past Lives.

One of the most familiar tropes in sci-fi and fantasy narratives – especially recently – is the existence of multiple existences in different dimensions that echo each other but don’t replicate them. (That is, of course, the premise of the delectable animated Spider-Verse franchise.) In Past Lives, the debut film by Celine Song, those echoes are meant to suggest lives the characters have already led but don’t remember; layered on each other through time, they create a ghostly pyramid that leads us toward the coupling fate intended for us. After Maestro and the Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, Past Lives was my favorite movie last year. It’s not like anything else I’ve ever seen. Song was born in South Korea but her family emigrated to Canada when she was still a little girl, and as an adult she emigrated again, this time to New York, where she is a playwright and now a screenwriter and director. Past Lives is based on her own story, and the idea for it came out of an extraordinary moment when she sat in a Manhattan bar flanked by her white American husband and her Korean childhood sweetheart.

That’s the image that begins the film, and initially it’s a mysterious one because Song chooses to shoot it from the perspective of an unseen couple across the room who speculate in voice-over what the connection could be among these three people. Are the woman and the white guy in a relationship, and is the Korean fellow her brother? Or is she with the Korean man, and if so, who the hell is the white dude? At the end of this fascinating introduction, the woman (Greta Lee) turns toward the camera and seems to stare into it, as if she were challenging the curious onlookers – and us – to figure it out. Past Lives is a quiet, understated picture, but everything about it, from the opening on, is wildly unconventional. Generically it’s a romantic drama, but the three people in that image – the Korean is played by Teo Yoo, the American by John Magaro – are the only major characters and, indeed, almost the only ones we see for most of the movie. It’s about two love stories involving the same woman, Nora, who is the protagonist. But rather than balancing two romances, Nora’s with Hae Sung, her childhood crush, and with her husband, Arthur, a novelist, Song juxtaposes a romance that actually transpired with one that, though it seemed poised to turn into a love story, was never acted upon. When Nora moves to Toronto she changes her name (from Na Young) and they lose touch. But he finds her twelve years later and they become computer correspondents, lovers only on Zoom. It’s an intense long-distance relationship, but she cuts it off, explaining to him that she has to commit to her life in America rather than look up the price of plane tickets to Seoul, that clearly he’s not going to move to New York and she’s not going to return to Korea. A dozen more years go by, and before they reconnect again there’s a brief interlude in which we see how she and Arthur get together when they meet at an art colony. Then suddenly they’re married, on their way home to New York from visiting her family in Toronto. Song fills in the gaps later, through Nora and Arthur’s conversation, but these narrative leaps are part of the point: if any of us stopped in the course of our life and looked back on it, the path that led us to where we are would likely seem unfathomable. We’re like the child in Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem “In the Waiting Room” who thumbs through a copy of the National Geographic in a doctor’s anteroom and is suddenly thunderstruck by the improbability of human individuation, or twelve-year-old Frankie Addams in The Member of the Wedding, stumbling across the same puzzle of identity.

Back in Seoul, Hae Sung has become an engineer and put a long-term relationship with a woman on hold (never, we suspect, to be picked up again). He reaches out to Nora once more because he’s coming to New York for a few days – ostensibly for a vacation, but, as Arthur suspects, really to see her after nearly a quarter-century because he’s never gotten over her. He was upset when she flew out of his life when they were kids, then set adrift when she put a stop to their communication after they’d found each other twelve years earlier, when it became clear to her that he was trying to draw her back to Korea. (During one of their Zoom conversations he “takes” her up a mountain to show her views of Seoul she never experienced while she was growing up there.) The tension she was feeling that made her retreat from him was between her Korean self and her American self, and she emphatically didn’t want to go back to being Korean, but, though he doesn’t know it, putting their relationship aside wasn’t easy for her. They had been in a weird limbo during this strange, enchanted period because they didn’t actually become lovers. Still, now he feels he’s lost her again; he looks enviously at young couples in the subway. It’s a break-up of the ghost of a romance, and it has continued to haunt him.

So they meet, finally, in New York. It’s awkward at first but warm; she’s the one who reaches out for an embrace, and it takes him a moment, nervous and unsure of himself as he is, to return it. The writing of their conversation is remarkable, I think – Song gives us both the fumbling and self-consciousness and the bursts of familiarity that build on a lifetime, interrupted as it has been, of connectednesss. When he asks about her marriage to Arthur, she’s frank about the difficulties a marriage poses (“It’s like planting two trees in the same pot”), and she asks him about his work, his time in the army (required in South Korea), his relationship with the girlfriend who is both out of his life and still in it. When she goes home to Arthur at the end of the first day of her reunion with Hae Sung, she’s full of chatter about him. He’s “so Korean,” she claims, and when she’s with him she feels so not Korean. Yet when she confides that she’d missed him, she admits that it’s Seoul she’d missed. It’s clear that she hasn’t resolved her feeling about either Korea or Hae Sung, that in her mind they’re inseparable.

Past Lives isn’t just a movie about the possible rekindling of an old romance; Arthur is as central to it as Nora and Hae Sung are. His discomfort with the presence of Hae Sung in Manhattan is confusing for him because, he tells his wife, he feels he has no right to be jealous or angry. But he confesses that he feels helpless to compete with a childhood sweetheart who has come back after all these years, the leading man in a story that is so much more romantic than the story of how he and Nora got together: they began to sleep together at the art colony out of loneliness, they moved in together to save money on rent, and the steps they took toward marriage were sped up by the necessity of obtaining a green card for Nora. Their narrative seems looser, less stable, less inevitable. Nora assures him that if her fate led her to Arthur, then that’s where she’s supposed to be: the difference in their points of view is the difference between the way a man born Jewish and American and a woman born Korean and Buddhist would naturally look at things. There’s an amazing scene between them in bed after her first day with Hae Sung where he tells her that she makes his life bigger and she affirms that he does the same for her. Yet still he’s not sure he does; how can he be sure? “You’re forgetting the part that I love you,” she reminds him, and he answers, “I’m not forgetting that. I just can’t believe it sometimes.” He tells her that some nights he lies awake and hears her talk in her sleep in Korean, and it unsettles him that she’s dreaming in a language that he can’t understand, that “there’s this whole place inside of you where I can’t go.” (He’s been struggling to learn Korean so he can understand what she says in her sleep.)

The next day Nora brings Hae Sung home to meet her husband, who takes them out for pasta and then to a bar. Song replays the opening image of the film, only now we can hear what they’re saying. Most of the time Arthur is an outsider: Nora and Hae Sung speak to each other in their native language, and though subtitles fill us in on what they’re saying, they don’t translate for him because it’s too complicated to do so, too distracting. But we can see how Arthur is suffering, stuck on the outside. At one point Nora turns to him and informs him, “He’s talking about you” and Arthur smiles, but her drawing him into her conference with Hae Sung for a moment doesn’t help because he has no idea how he’s being referenced. At the end of the evening, the two men are alone in the bar for a moment and Hae Sung apologizes for their leaving him out of the conversation; Arthur assures him that he understands, that Nora and Hae Sung hadn’t seen each other in so long and they needed space to talk, and he adds that Hae Sung’s coming to New York to see Nora was the right thing to do. Though the film honors the complexity of his wife’s, we have to admire his generosity – and of course the profound love that motivates it.

When Nora and Arthur first get to know each other, she teaches him the Korean word “in-yun,” a Buddhist notion which acknowledges the link between people who connected somehow in their past lives. She explains to him that if they should ever get married, it would have to be because there have been eight thousand layers of “in-yun” between them in eight thousand previous lifetimes. In the bar, she and Hae Sung theorize about the difference between the kind of “in-yun” they have, which was not enough to bring them together in this life, and the kind she and Arthur have, which was. (That’s when Nora turns to her husband and says, “He’s talking about you.”) When she walks Hae sung to his Uber at the end of the night they barely speak but their silence is eloquent: we sense that they’re thinking about their past lives, which they don’t remember but which have brought them to this complicated pass, and that they’re also considering the life together that they never made it to. Then Song cuts movingly to an image of them as children, the last time they had to say goodbye to each other. Back in the present, he asks her, “What if this is a past life as well?” He can’t let go of the connection they had as children, the one that she left him with when she went off to Canada with her family all those years ago.

All three of the actors are magnificent: Greta Lee, whom I’d seen only on the second season of The Morning Show (in a dreadful part that certainly didn’t showcase her lightly ironic wit and muted but distinct emotional alertness); John Magaro, whose work I’ve always admired (especially in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow); and Teo Yoo, whom I barely recognized from a supporting role in the fine Korean movie Decision to Leave. Each leaves a poignant emotional footprint on the film; the work they do with Song is startlingly intimate. And the movie leaves you in a state that’s different from the one produced any other romantic drama: sad but in a way that’s difficult to explain. Nora returns, weeping, to Arthur’s arms; he’s the right person to comfort her but at best he can only strive to comprehend what she’s going through. What’s devastating about the end of Past Lives is that, even though what she and Hae Sung have lost is something they never really had, still the thought of what might have been lingers, like a ghost.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.