You May Have Missed: Past Lives (Dir Celine Song, 1h46m, 2023).
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| UK poster for Past Lives |
The directorial debut, that first feature, the beginning of a director's career, comes in many forms. Few film goers will have seen Sergio Leone's unremarkable debut, The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), Coppola's schlocky Dementia 13 (1963), or Eisenstein's first five minutes of fame in Glumov's Diary (1923) on their release millions have seen Sugarland Express (1974), The Castle of Calgiostro, (1979) and Reservoir Dogs (1992). The cinematic debut either passes unseen, coloured by later, better-known work, or else stands alone as proof of concept, a style as work-in-progress, or on rare occasions, is the arrival of an entire cinematic style wholesale. Past Lives, the debut of playwright and screenwriter Celine Song, is the latter, a smartly made, if bitter-sweet tale of childhood sweethearts drifting apart and back together over the decades, that may be the best directorial debut of the decade so far.
For a screenwriter and director with three Golden Globe nominations, and a Berlin Film Festival nomination to her name, Song's previous work may seem unexpectedly slim. Past Lives is only her second script-writing credit, after eight episodes of Amazon's adaption of the mammoth Robert Jordan fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, whilst her sole produced play (alongside an online production of Chekov's The Seagull in the unusual form of inside the videogame, The Sims 4), Endlings, which examines the experiences of traditional Korean mollusc farmers, or haenyeo, with those of a Korean-Canadian playwright in New York. There is an undeniable autobiographical element to both Endlings and Past Lives. Song, like the heroine of Past Lives, Na Young/Nora Moon (Greta Lee), is the daughter of artists, one of them a film maker, who emigrated to Canada in the 1990s, and, Song, like Nora, subsequently moved to New York to become a writer.
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| Nora Moon (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) reunite in New York |
However, around this autobiographical frame, Song has created a film that between the beats of a romantic drama, considers what it means to love and live. After an opening shot, in which unseen figures in a New York bar discuss the triptych of our central trio, trying to decipher the links between Nora, her American writer husband Arthur, (John Magaro) and her childhood friend, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), before eventually giving up on trying to guess. Life, so Song intimates, is more complicated than that, and thus the film flashes back twenty-four years to Nora/Na's childhood with Hae Sung. This section of the film, whilst the slightest, is perhaps the sweetest, the children playing the younger Na and Hae Sung (Seung Ah Moon and Seung Min Yim)'s friendship charming, their teenage date, observed at a distance by their parents, a tender moment in which their friendship teeters on the edge of something more. Comparisons can be made to the childhood depicted in the early sequences of Richard Linklater's 2014 Boyhood. These moments in mundane actions of two friends are given weight and meaning by the events that follow.
For, along with her family, Na soon leaves her native Korea behind, and it is here that the film begins to meditate on its second theme-that of nationhood and home. There is an extended scene in which the family pick out English names for their move to Canada, whilst it's later noted that "No one from Korea wins a Nobel Prize for Literature". Only when going under another name, and having moved from the country of her birth to Canada, and then again, to New York to study, does Nora feel that her work will be considered. Remembering that Song still goes under her Korean birth-name, the film is deeply embedded in the very nature of being part of the Korean-American diaspora, divorced from Korean culture. We can already see this in the final shots of Na and Hae Sung as children, the frame divided almost in two, as she ascends a set of stairs whilst he carries on on the level. They are divided from this point onward, either physically in frame, or by the thousands of miles between them.
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| Nora Moon/Na Young and Hae Sung (Seung Ah Moon and Seung Min Yim) take different paths |
It is into this physical and emotional divide that the film next turns. After a brief sequence showing Nora and her family entering Canada, where Nora and her sister already seem Americanised, and a further vignette of her in the school yard, the film jumps ahead twelve years, to Nora in New York, and we see just how much she has divided from her homeland. We get a brief scene of Hae Sung on military service, a camouflaged line of young men marching along a riverbank. We are face to face, then with Nora, the Americanised Na Young, whose Korean has become rusty from speaking only to her mother in her native tongue, stumble across her childhood friend on Facebook, who, unaware that she has anglicised her name, remains searching for Na Young. There is a poignancy to this little detail, a sense, even before they do reunite, albeit at long distance, of Hae Sung searching for Na Young rather than Nora Moon, of the Korean he knew in his childhood, rather than the Korean-Canadian now living in America.
Their digital reunion, when it does come-the recreation of mid 2010s Facebook and Skype are as admirable as they are oddly nostalgic, the idea that this is a film told as much as memoir, as recollection of a past love, as Nora and Hae Sung reunite, at opposite ends of the world, and via screens, as it is a romantic drama. The middle of the film, after all, is essentially a quirky, and curiously indie-romance film in miniature, and the closest it comes to being the 'typical' A24 romance, the film rekindling their relationship, albeit in the glow of a laptop screen; as they share their hopes for the future, each slowly trying to convince the other to visit them. This culminates with Hae Sung showing her Seoul through his phone, before,at Nora's behest, they agree to take a break, with Nora heading to her writer's retreat, where she meets Arthur.
The film advances another twelve years and it is here that the true narrative weight of the film is focused, with Hae Sung coming to New York to meet Nora, whilst, now married to her, Arthur worries that she has married him simply so she can remain an American citizen and that he is now getting in the way of the off-and-on love story between Nora and Hae Sung. It is here that the film returns to the bar scene, with the context of how Nora and Hae Sung have got here, as their previously three way conversation, with Nora translating back and forth between the two men in her life, a perfect visual and narrative shorthand to the life she finds herself in, neither truly American nor Korean, even as she begins to converse with Hae Sung.
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| Nora, Arthur, (John Magaro), and Hae Sung on the streets of New York |
Together, in the film's most affecting scene, the two converse in Korean, mulling over the Korean concept of "In-Yun", of their possible destinies, of what past, or alternative, lives could have brought them, before the final scenes of the film consider what happens next, and what path Nora finally takes. The concluding shots of both Nora and Hae Sung are lingering long-takes, their emotions raw and open to the air as their lives continue onward. It is a final act that, at once, manages to be a romantic drama with gravitas, and a film that unquestionably considers the factors, the twenty-four years of distance, that have drawn Hae Sung and Nora apart, and the film's final scenes are as affecting as they are beautifully acted.
Past Lives says much about the Korean-American experience, and much about its director and writer's experiences, fictionalised as it is in her cinematic debut. With Song's next film, The Materialists, due to begin production this September, only time will tell if she is to become a major new voice in American cinema. Past Lives, for its part, is a nigh-perfect debut, a film that considers at once the idea of love across borders, and across the years, and the Korean-American experience in a remarkable romantic drama.
Rating: Highly Recommended
Past Livesis available to watch online in the UK via AppleTV,
and on DVD from StudioCanal. It is also currently available to
stream via Apple TV, and on DVD from
Lionsgate Home Entertainment in the USA.
Next
week, we journey across an inhospitable Iceland in the 19th century, in the footsteps, and photographs of a Danish priest in Godland.
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