"Past Lives" - Film Review
“Who do you think they are to each other?” asks a voice as the movie begins. We never know who the voice belongs to. It could be a patron at a bar, a boyfriend, a brother, who knows. They’re two faceless people who are mulling over the question, “who do you think they are to each other?” It’s a fun people-watching game to play in public spaces, but these two people ask the question, not to make small talk or play games, but because the scene playing out in front of them is impossible to look away from. Three people sit at a bar: Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), and Arthur (John Magaro). How they know each other is the question Past Lives tries to answer.
The film is filled with the sort of trappings that audiences have seen time and again. There are childhood crushes separated, returning, separating again, and returning once more. Along the way, falling in and out of love with each other and strangers. Nora and Hae Sung grew up together in Seoul in the ’90s. Nora’s parents decide to emigrate to Toronto when Nora’s about twelve years old. That’s the last time Nora and Hae Sung see each other in person for twenty-four years. Nora eventually moves to New York City to pursue her dreams of being a playwright and meets Arthur at an artists’ residency. The two marry and create a lovely existence together, but the return of Hae Sung forces all three of them to question everything that has led up to this point.
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Effectively, the question of how Nora, Arthur, and Hae Sung know each other has been explained in the paragraph above or in the trailer or logline for the film. All these sources of information answer the bare minimum the question is asking. What none of these sources can possibly explain is the depth of the emotions at play here. It’s not simply the return of a long-lost childhood friend, it’s the “what if” question that creeps into play. What if Nora had stayed in Korea? What if a different guy had shown up in Arthur’s place at the artists’ residency? What if Hae Sung had visited New York City sooner? The weight of these questions is crushing, but for most of their lives there has been no need to ask them. It’s only when all three of these people are sitting at the same bar in the same city at the same time that their brains are forced to wander and wonder.
In-yun is a Korean word used to describe a sense of shared history. The simple brush of a shoulder with someone in a crowded place is the culmination of years of past lives coming to the surface of this present one. Nora tells Arthur that people who get married have 8,000 layers of in-yun between them, and that’s what led them down the aisle. It’s a central concept to the film (which likely borrows its name from in-yun), but Past Lives also posits that there are past lives within one lifetime. Everyone gets older, but the younger versions of ourselves still exist within us. Nora is her current age and can also have flashes of the twelve-year-old girl Hae Sung knew so well. The time they shared together, growing up, sharing crushes, competing at school, all of that still exists, even if it’s not the current reality. There is truth in history even if it’s long gone and fading from memory.
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How is it possible that a film so gentle, so sincere, and so loving can create such a gasp-inducing gut-punch? Is it simply the reality of life? Where things are simultaneously right and wrong, painful and exultant, lovely and devastating in the same breath. Is it not just the human condition and the fundamental flaw of being alive? Part of what makes Past Lives such a personal experience is that writer/director Celine Song asks the audience to fill in a lot of the blanks. Not in a way that makes the film feel underdeveloped, but Song gives the audience a build-up of these relationships before backing away. These characters are silhouetted figures, going through motions and sharing words we’ll never hear. It’s genius, because now the audience is looking up at what’s playing out on the screen and remembering their own “what if” person. Thinking about the people they knew and lost track of, wondering where that path would have led them.
“Who do you think they are to each other?” The question echoes as the film’s ending returns to the bar where it was initially asked. Perhaps a better question is, what does it mean to know someone? Why is something as essential as human connection such a terrifying, painful, freeing leap off a cliff? It’s questions like these that will be pondered for the entire existence of humanity. Instead of worrying about the answers, Past Lives makes the case for accepting people into our lives almost freely. They can be exactly what you need them to be at that moment. Nothing more, nothing less.
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