A Review of Past Lives
On tracing past lives in Celine Songs directorial debut.
This review was written in early September 2023. I originally watched the movie on the 30th of August 2023.
It’s been two almost 2 weeks since I watched Past Lives, yet for some reason, I still feel like I should let this movie settle a little bit longer before I write something about it. But before I forget stuff, I figured it might be best to get started with a review and add more as the weeks go by. My visit to the cinema for Past Lives came at a weird time, I was just packing up my things to move from Edinburgh back to Berlin, while at the same time preparing myself for numerous goodbyes. In this sense, I’m frankly not too sure whether me watching Past Lives could have come at a better or worse time.
Past Lives, follows Na Young (Nora) and Hae Sung as childhood friends/more than friends that are disconnected by Na Young’s move to the US. 12 years later they reconnect via Facebook and engage in a long distance “friendship” via Skype. Eventually, Na Young, now going by the name Nora decides that she requires space from their relationship to focus on her writing career and they decide to both not talk with each other for a while. Their lives go their separate ways, both ending up in different relationships. Here, we are also introduced to the notion of “Inyeon” which can also be translated to fate. Nora also explains that if we engage in a romantic relationship with someone, we must have lots of Inyeon or many smaller relationships in our past lives that amounted to the close relationship in this life.
Once again 12 years pass and Hae Sung gets some time off work and decides to visit New York, obviously also to see Nora. His own relationship at home is crumbling and he seeks some distance from Seoul. Nora welcomes him and they decide to meet to reflect on their past and their long-gone childhood. Nora shows Hae Sung around New York but as his departure moves closer, they both realise that in this life they were not meant to be, leaving the possibility open for their next lives. We experience a silent, heartfelt, possibly final goodbye, with Nora eventually falling into tears as Hae Sung drives off.
Past Lives is beautifully shot; accompanied by a fantastic atmospheric and spacious soundtrack and brilliant, convincing, and heartfelt performances by Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro. In Past Lives, shots linger, and we are left with the expressions of the characters for quite some time before we cut to the next scene. It feels like one is part of the very tension that is experienced by all characters as they try and express their emotions with the past weighing on them. This is where the acting shines, not only in the verbal performance but in the expressions that say so much more than any of the words uttered by our characters.
Throughout Past Lives we are faced with questions of identity, belonging, home and the impenetrable barriers between people. As Nora’s family decides to move to the US, she and her sister seem more confused than anything. I find this particularly heart-breaking as this is a general challenge when moving far away as a child. You are thrown out of an environment you feel very used to and have a hard time understanding and comprehending the new world you are entering. However, Nora’s mother understands this too, as she indicates that moving is a loss, but one can also gain from it. Nora copes with this situation by sucking up her emotions because no one cares to understand this feeling of moving half-way around the globe into a vastly different environment. After all, it seems almost impossible to explain the differences in experiences from one place to another, especially if they’re thousands upon thousands of miles apart.
We can see this challenge continued in her relationship with Arthur. When Arthur expresses to Nora, that she “dreams in a language that he can't understand”, we are faced with this very notion of subjective experience that seems impossible to decipher from the outside. Yes, Arthur learns to speak Korean but there is another dimension of growing up in a linguistic context/bilingual context that remains undisclosed to another individual. This is not to endorse some epistemic solipsism or any other sort of idea that other minds remain fully undisclosed, but there is an element of another mind that seems unreachable from the outside. Arthur can attempt to understand Nora but the true feeling of what it “is like” to have these feelings of grief and loss towards the possibility of the past most likely remains disclosed. This boundary in the relationship with Arthur or even later on with Hae Sung is not supposed to be understood as something that prevents our engagement with others but rather it opens up the opportunity for more empathy and understanding. When Nora and Hae Sung later have their final goodbye, both characters understand this barrier. This awareness is what makes the entire situation and ending so sad yet somehow bittersweet. In their current life, their paths had moved too far apart to become recoverable. The “what if” is what remains.
The challenge of impenetrability also maintains itself in Nora’s own upbringing, where she is too far uprooted from her background, making it difficult to recall what life was like as a child in Korea. The challenge of understanding each other on a deeper level is thus not only a challenge for Adam and Hae Sung but Nora herself, therefore remaining in a limbo of questioning her identity and relation to Hae Sung.
The long-time jumps in Past Lives further alleviate the challenges that are faced by Nora and Hae Sung. As 12 years go by, we encounter two individuals in radically different environments, even when Nora and Hae Sung first get in touch again and develop a routine in their communication, their lives are in vastly different states (not merely location-wise) resulting in their disconnection. Another 12 years go by and the two become further separated even if they are able to recall their shared past and how they feel being so far apart as Hae Sung visits New York. In a way, they have missed each other’s lives and can only hold on to the past knowing they now exist in widely different worlds with widely different subjective experiences both culturally and linguistically. Time is quite vicious in Past Lives.
Unsurprisingly, we see how difficult it is for Nora and Hae Sung to say goodbye to each other. In some ways, it is almost impersonal and awkward with both being aware of what they are losing but not ready for the actuality of losing what could have been and the pain of not being able to recover past opportunities. But realistically we can hardly blame them. For Nora, their final goodbye is also a goodbye from the childhood environment that she was uprooted from. An environment that she is so far away from at this stage in her life that it seems unrecoverable as her childhood home. She doesn’t have the experiences of growing up or becoming an adult in Korea, these are now reserved for the US. With her childhood moving away further and further, this link practically only exists in language but nothing else. For most people it is almost impossible to recall their early childhood, now think about trying to recall a childhood in a place so vastly different from the place you have lived most of your life. Your memories almost turn anecdotal rather than embodied in a specific time and place. Nora’s emotional reaction is therefore not only heart-breaking in terms of the relationship with Hae Sung but the relationship she had with her past home and general past. Her coping mechanism of sucking up her emotions because no one cared finally crumbles, as she can finally grieve for the life she lost when moving and all the possibilities of “what if” connected to her past life in Korea. In this sense, she grieves the life she never got to live as a younger self.
For Hae Sung, the final goodbye at least gives more reconciliation than their initial childhood goodbye which came out of nowhere, left him with many questions and similarly in a different environment (while in the same location) by losing his closest childhood companion. But in this moment, he also realises that their relationship is left as a what if, to be continued in the next life. Na Young still exists in memory and in the past but is no longer sufficiently recoverable in Nora. The curse of time and moving.
In challenging present lives by bringing about past lives, Past Lives not only investigates memory but also the barriers that are invertedly pushed between us through different experiences, language, and life itself. In conveying these experiences and emotions, Past Lives is very subtle but after reflection extremely powerful. As someone, who moved halfway across the world as a child and various other times throughout adolescence this movie hits hard in many ways and captures the feelings associated with being uprooted from an environment; and living with the loss of and longing for said environment. I am grateful for a movie being able to embrace the grief and loss of “what if” not only in terms of relationships but also in terms of growing up and childhood. It is a question I ask myself a lot and I’m not sure if I ever will stop asking it but I’m glad I got to experience this movie because it brings out this question so clearly. I can’t recall any other movie that has conveyed this very feeling in this subtle, heartfelt, and impactful manner. Thank you, Celine Song.
(Review to be continued (possibly maybe))
What a beautiful thorough and reflected review!