“There is a word in Korean: In-yun. It means providence, or fate. But it’s specifically about relationships between people. It’s an In-yun if two strangers even walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush, because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives.”
The movie opens on a shot of three people at a bar viewed from afar -two men, one Korean, one white, sitting on either side of a Korean woman. A couple of unseen onlookers attempt to guess the nature of their relationship, presuming that she is married to the white man and the Korean is her visiting brother, but noting how the Koreans seem more engaged with each other, barely looking at the other guy, opining they may in fact be a couple and the white guy simply a tourist or their tour guide. The viewer may well make these same guesses, and indeed the speculation is coming from the first-person camera perspective. And it’s indicative of a thousand observations of a thousand different people in a thousand different cities. Outsiders to a relationship impressing a considered story on it. I wonder if there’s any connection in that? Any In-yun?
Celine Song’s beautiful and bittersweet Past Lives, her feature filmmaking debut, is one of the great movie conversations on the subject of destiny that I have ever seen. It presents the foundations for a kind of perfect love story and explores what they mean -if anything at all. Can two people really be meant for each other, drawn by forces of the universe or more poetic ideas of love, or is it just the matter of a series of circumstances, particular connections or absences that create such notions. As much as Everything Everywhere All at Once, this is a movie about the choices we make, how they shape us, and the road not taken -albeit in a less literal purely romantic way. Would there be such power to a relationship if not for a few select choices? And does it really matter?
The movie owes a lot to Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, one of the grand opuses of romance cinema -containing little bits of each installment, but most principally the middle chapter Before Sunset, in which two people who shared a profound romance a decade ago meet again and assess where their lives are at, what kind of people they are, and what they mean to each other. It is the story of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). Nora (or Na Young) moved away from Korea with her family when she was twelve, disrupting her close friendship with her crush Hae Sung. After growing up in Canada, she immigrated again to New York to follow her dreams of becoming a playwright, and through social media reconnects with Hae Sung in the aftermath of his military service. A long-distance rekindling of their relationship is sparked and yet it doesn’t last, as other priorities for each of them get in the way. But after a dozen years, he comes to visit her, she now married and with deep commitments in the city.
After beginning from the outside looking in on the appearance of this relationship, Song dives into its complexity with an affecting tenderness. In their childhood together she finds evocative moments that are emphasized later on, hones in on the memorable parts of their dynamic -like where Hae Sung got a better grade than Na Young and has held onto that well into adulthood. She understands that it is often such slight things that stand out -indeed the scenes of their childhood shortly before Na Young immigrates are a bit nondescript: they don’t talk a whole lot, they walk home together every day from school and play in a park, it’s all very ordinary. And they part ways with a simple goodbye.
But there is an awful lot tied up in that goodbye, and Song emphasizes so in beautiful ways throughout the rest of the movie. Their first reconnection over Skype in 2010 bears all those cute and awkward hallmarks of a long-time reunion, the shyness of body language, the stumbling over words, of course illustrated in the frequent glitchiness of Skype. Where the kinds of movies that Song draws on for this, from the likes of Linklater and Noah Baumbach, tend to be heavily dialogue driven, Past Lives is an intensely visual film -the profundity of this relationship illustrated via cinematic language and performance nuances: close-ups on Nora as she prepares to initiate the first chat, a lingering shot of Hae Sung in the dark as he takes in her proposal to suffer a break from communicating. And the juxtapositions are so perfectly deliberate -I don’t know that I’ve ever been so moved by mere establishing shots as when the film cuts from midday in Seoul to midnight in New York over Hae Sung talking to Nora about his impetus to search for her: two estranged souls on opposite sides of the world though more deeply connected than most people next door to each other.
Yet as is illustrated in an exceptionally literal way, connections are lost. Either the most tragic or the most poignant aspect of the movie is Nora and Hae Sung moving on with their lives after that short rekindling of their childhood relationship. Meeting again in the present day in their thirties, their worlds are changed in permanent ways. In 2012, Nora met Arthur (John Magaro) at a writer’s retreat, and about three years later they were married. Around the same time Hae Sung moved to China and began a long-term relationship that dissipated shortly before he came to New York. There is no serendipity this time around -he came to see her. And Song charmingly acknowledges the poetic traits of their story, articulated by Arthur half-jokingly recognizing he looks like the bad guy in their decades-spanning, seemingly fated romance.
But what was fate for Nora and Hae Sung? Talking of connections, at twenty-four years how connected are they from those children who parted ways? Hae Sung notes that as a kid Nae Young wanted to win the Nobel Prize someday -in 2010 he asks Nora about this and she responds she’d take a Pulitzer, in 2022, she’s lowered her bar to a Tony. Reality has long set for both of them, something that perhaps takes Hae Sung this visit to truly understand.
There’s a reason Song focuses on In-yun as the film’s definition of fate, evoking it a couple times through conversation. In-yun is an idea of fate tied to the past more than the future, that people meant something to each other in their past lives more than they do or in a different way than in the present. Her story here is constructed so that it can challenge operative notions of destiny, the idea that it can mean only a single thing. What two people are to each other isn’t set in the stone, but there is something romantic in the idea that having had a connection means something in a cosmic sense. In maybe the most thoughtful scene of the movie, Hae Sung and Nora speculate on what their relationship would be had she not moved away. They may well could have been sweethearts through high school, married, had children. But they may also have split up after a time, gone their separate ways in a different context without any kind of the yearning that comes from a sudden absence. Had one of them made the leap in 2010 to come to New York or Seoul, as both debated at the time, would Nora have made the same choices that led to meeting and marrying Arthur, or would she and Hae Sung have gotten back together, possibly in another country. It’s fitting that the movie brings up Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, because it engages in similar points about fateful romance and the choices not made, albeit with very different aims.
Who among us hasn’t had someone we were close with in childhood, in friendship or otherwise, whom we lost contact with yet thought about intermittently over the years. There’s a specificity so resonant that Song is exploring here with intense interest and a caring grace. And it’s brought to the fore by Lee and Yoo in their naturalistic chemistry and breathtakingly subtle yet vivid performances that are among the best of the year (those silent moments between them may be the most captivating). Magaro too is impeccable, as Song ensures he is not the character he ironically sees himself as, as self-conscious as he may be to the comparative mundaneness of his and Nora’s love story and the fear that he hasn’t had the effect on her that she’s had on him. Of course in reality, both Arthur and Hae Sung are equally intimidated by each other, equally hoping to impress one another. It’s a very charming dynamic that develops between the three through their short meeting.
In spite of it all, Song can’t give herself over to completely rejecting the compulsion of Nora and Hae Sung as soulmates. He suggests that perhaps they themselves are just past lives, and that they’ll meet in other circumstances in the next life. Song’s last scene of them together, a masterstroke single-take brimming with unspoken tension and underwritten emotion, interrupted only once for a quick match-cut that takes your breath away, speaks to her belief in this and to the valid power of their distant, intimate connection across twenty-four years.
Past Lives is a radiant statement on choices and true destiny, a sentimental yet mature and abiding love story so uncommon a thing to see in the movies; and yet the very reason movies are worth going to see.
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