Past Lives is a woozy but cool romance where much is suggested but little given. The will they/won’t they is endlessly deferred and if not very much happens, what does happen is properly intense. Right to the last second writer/director Celine Song leaves us dangling. Bracket this one with In the Mood for Love, Casablanca and Brief Encounter.
Boy meets girl, loses girl, remeets girl and… But the story starts in South Korea, where young schoolkids Hae Sung and Na have a relationship so intense that their parents arrange a mock “date” for them. More as a joke than anything else – Na’s family is about to emigrate to Canada and her mother knows Hae Sung will soon be history.
Twelve years pass. Na (now renamed Nora and played by Greta Lee) is a writer recently relocated from Canada to New York. In a moment of idle speculation she does a Facebook search for Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), discovers he’s also been looking for her (using her old name) and they re-connect. Talk. Re-connect some more.
Twelve more years pass. Nora is now married. Hae Sung has been living in China. And then, out of the blue he gets back in touch to say he’s coming to New York on a trip. They meet. She shows him the sights. They go for a meal, Nora and Hae Sung and Nora’s husband, Arthur.
And that’s all that happens. This is Celine Song’s debut and what a debut, a remarkable assemblage of single shots and episodes together making up an emotional whole. In short scenes constantly intercutting we glimpse a moment in Nora’s life, then a moment in Hae Sung’s. Hae Sung and Nora are apart and yet, this raft assembled from emotional flotsam suggests, they are somehow together.
Song’s framing adds to the impression. Nora isolated in a scene. So is Hae Sung when the story returns to him. A shot of her with a vital bit missing (a head, maybe) and then something similar with him. When Song shows us salt and pepper shakers, they are a significant distance apart from each other, and yet also clearly part of a set. The near-subliminal suggestion is almost relentless and reminiscent not just of Wong Kar Wei (director of In the Mood for Love) but also Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, another masterpiece of storytelling via emotional semaphore.
Song apparently kept her key actors, Lee and Yoo, apart as much as possible, so that something of Nora and Hae’s nervousness at their first meeting as adults would come across. The ruse worked. It does. The two actors are brilliantly tentative.
But where does Arthur figure in all this? Enter John Magaro, a shapeshifter actor so adept at becoming part of any scenario that you might not remember him in a number of big movies. In First Cow he was the lead, but he was also in The Many Saints of Newark, The Big Short and Carol. What a tough role this is. The inadvertent bad guy we need at some level to feel sorry for. He pulls it off, magnificently and yet without show.
All the actors do their thing brilliantly, and the soundtrack of ambient washes and small-hours jazz gentles the story along, but it’s the camera that does most of the storytelling in this movie. Editing choices and post-production too. Perhaps nodding to In the Mood for Love, Song warms up the colour palette as things warm up emotionally. Along the way she poses a question about the role of ethnicity in all this – is blood thicker than marriage? – but it is entirely incidental. We are dragged along by the sheer aching romance of it all.
Past Lives – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
