Past Lives (2023)

 

Past Lives (2023)

Director: Celine Song

Stars: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro

Short Review, no spoilers

Affairs limited by heart-wrenching barriers between would-be lovers are nothing new in drama, however Past Lives is a modern take on the kind that are devastating for their polite restraint. This one clings by a slender thread stretched across South Korea to the USA via stuttering video call connections and childhood memory, and is problematised by personal ambition and cultural difference. The intelligent performances of the two leads that are masterclasses in subtle emotional punch as well as character definition are worth the watch alone. It is also an illuminatingly personal perspective of migration and how it affects an individual psyche.

Full Review (spoilers)

Past Lives is a disarmingly small story told through several tendrils – through the poignancy of a love affair distanced by both time and geography; through the differences between one nation and another; and through distinct personalities that show influences of gender and culture but are nevertheless drawn to each other by something perhaps indefinable, maybe not even real in a flesh and blood sense.

At the beginning, Seung Ah Moon demonstrates the naïve brutality of a bold little girl that takes things as they come when she bids a flippant goodbye to a boy that she likes very much. To him it cuts much deeper. Later in life, she’s now Nora and flying high in New York when she stumbles upon a social media reach out from her long-lost friend and responds. They embark upon a relationship via regular video calls, which lasts until both have to call time as they respectively have personal ambitions they can’t ignore, and so ends a potentially powerful romance. Each drift in to committed relationships and know no more of each other until another 12 years pass and Hae Sung contacts Nora again – he’s broken up with a long-term girlfriend and has finally decided to come to New York, but it’s just a vacation as Nora assures her husband. Until she meets Hae Sung that is and with dubious/admirable candidness, tells husband Arthur that yes he has come specifically to see her, is an attractive man, and has stirred memories of the land she was born in but hasn’t seen since she left over 20 years previously. Naturally perhaps this is what an insecure Arthur hears most loudly when to be fair, Nora also speaks of the intensity of memory that inevitably stirs feelings that can be skewed and misinterpreted, as well as reassurances that she does indeed love her husband and is a practical woman who has no desire to throw her carefully assembled life away for one that could have but didn’t happen.

Dinner between the love triangle is excruciating, with Arthur firmly on the outside but hanging in there while the reunion plays out. This is no period drama with old-fashioned constraints, rather an apparently emotionally mature modern tale of restricted love where we are all to understand that of course you would choose career over love and dilute desire to make the sensible decisions in life. Arthur and Hae Sung are cordial with each other and Nora is seemingly breezy. She strolls away with Hae Sung to wait for his Uber and they stand together with barely a word, slowly turning towards each other until they are abruptly interrupted by the taxi. Nothing has happened, nothing will happen, but finally repression is crushed when Nora breaks down in tears and is comforted by Arthur waiting on the steps to their building. Arthur showed surprise when she told him she was always a cry-baby and had to be comforted by Hae Sung in the past, but now finally the visit from her long-lost love has opened up the person she used to be to the one who worries that he doesn’t know that side of her enough.

Past Lives is in some senses a very traditional romance, a story of lost love troubled by physical distance and social obstacles. It’s disguised by modern sensibilities and objects however, not only technology and geographical remoteness, but also the now commonly accepted drive for ambition and professionalism. In place of previous social restraints to love, passion, emotion, risk that came from above, we now appear to do it to ourselves.

Differences in cultural values are highlighted when Nora observes how ‘Korean Korean’ Hae Sung is, as opposed to American Korean, that he still lives with his parents, and Hae Sung tells the couple that work for him is hard as he does his boss’ work as well as his own, as is the accepted way in his home country. Both characters are associated with their opposing cultural values – Nora is creative, competitive and emotional while Hae Sung is associated with obedience and practicality. But lest there be any danger of superiority from the Westernised Nora over Hae Sung, it is worth noting that as wry, confident and career-successful as Nora is, it is Hae Sung that has the bravery and emotional disregard for risk to put himself out there alone, to make the grand romantic gesture, whereas Nora is never prepared to even go to Korea let alone open herself up to the possibility of a different life with perhaps the one she is meant to be with.

Of course there are always other possible readings, like perhaps Hae Sung is less a fully-fledged character and more a ghost-like fantasy figure that represents Nora’s longing for a part of herself left behind in the country of her birth. Either way, it is a beautifully performed piece, with Teo Yoo as Hae Sung particularly commendable. Sensitive but dignified, masculine but vulnerable, he is the image of solidity yet represents the intangibility of psychic loss.