Celine Song (2023)
Writer-director Celine Song’s debut feature starts with three people – a woman and two men – sitting at a bar in New York City. They’re facing not only the camera but unseen observers whose voices speculate on the trio’s relationships to each other: one voice suggests the Asian man and woman are tourists and ‘the white guy’ is their guide? What’s most conspicuous about the threesome is that the Asians are giving each other rapt attention with the other man on the sidelines of their mutual absorption. Then the woman stares directly, and mournfully, into the camera lens. The next hour or so of Past Lives tells the story of how she comes to look so sad.
The main narrative begins with an extended flashback to Seoul, twenty-four years earlier; a girl and boy walk home from school. She is Na Young (Seung Ah Moon); he is Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim). They’re twelve years old, friends but also rivals at school: Na Young is tearful because Hae Sung has come top and she second in their class’s latest maths test – we gather from their conversation it’s usually the other way round. The two always walk to and from school together and have even been on a date (in a playground), arranged by their mothers, but Na Young is soon to emigrate to Canada with her parents and sister. Although the children are sorry to part, their leave-taking isn’t overtly emotional. They say a polite goodbye and literally go their separate ways. She climbs a flight of steps to her home. He walks at street level into the distance.
That the two kids grew up to be the Asian woman and man in the New York bar is quickly confirmed as Celine Song moves the action forward by twelve years. Na Young is now Nora Moon (Greta Lee), an aspiring writer living in NYC. Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) is just completing his military service in South Korea and about to resume engineering degree studies. Nora discovers on Facebook that Hae Sung has been trying to track her down under her former name. She makes contact with him; they start to Skype and enjoy talking together. But Hae Sung isn’t in a position to travel to New York for at least eighteen months and Nora isn’t keen to return to Korea – to (as she sees it) backtrack to a past she’s moved on from. At her suggestion, they stop Skyping. Hae Sung is hurt by this but gets himself a girlfriend, though little is shown of their relationship. At a writers’ retreat, Nora meets novelist Arthur (John Magaro) and it’s love at first sight. Another ’12 years passes’, as the text on screen has it. Nora is married to Arthur. And Hae Sung is finally coming to New York to visit her.
Celine Song was born in South Korea in 1988, emigrated with her parents to Canada when she was twelve, obtained her MFA in play writing from Colombia University in New York fourteen years later. It’s no surprise to read that Past Lives is at least somewhat autobiographical but that doesn’t guarantee convincing plotting and Song doesn’t supply this as far as the twelve-year interruptions are concerned. They may be crucial to Song’s heartstring-pulling purposes – the protagonists are not just Seoul mates but soulmates, meant to be, yet not, together – but the gaps in contact don’t otherwise make much sense. The first separation is relatively plausible because it occurs in a pre-Facebook (though not a pre-email) era – never mind that Na Young and Hae Sung strike you as the kind of likeably diligent children who would ensure they had at least each other’s postal address before they parted company. As for the hiatus between c 2010 and the present day, I just didn’t get why the pair stopped communicating in any way – or how dialogue had recently resumed.
The thirty-something Nora looked to me quite a bit older than Hae Sung. Appearances can be deceptive – Greta Lee is actually two years younger than Teo Yoo – but this particular deception is dramatically effective (even if unintended). It strengthens the implication that Hae Sung is more attached than Nora to what happened between them in childhood. Other elements reinforce that idea. Before she discovers Hae Sung on Facebook, Nora needs her mother to remind her of the name of the boy she was so friendly with in Seoul. Discussing him with her husband, she wonders if Hae Sung means a lot to her not because of his individual qualities but because, as a link to her childhood, he’s invested with nostalgic power. These details ring true – as does the unresolved tension between Nora and Hae Sung when they’re first reunited in the flesh and spend an afternoon together in New York. The conversation is tentative and stop-start. Most of us probably have had an experience like this: a long looked forward to opportunity to spend time with someone important finally arrives, and you’re determined not to waste it. The determination – combined with the realisation that what you’ve often imagined is now actually happening – ties the tongue.
And most of us internet users will recognise the impulse to try finding out what happened to childhood friends with whom we’ve lost touch. Celine Song, though, has something higher-toned in mind: the concept in Korean Buddhism of in-yeon – the idea that fate brings people together, and relationships between them develop, over the course of several lifetimes. Nora first mentions this to Arthur at the writers’ retreat but we hear more and more about it during Hae Sung’s climactic visit to New York: as a result, the impression we’ve gained that Hae Sung is keener on Nora than she is on him – which is one of the stronger aspects of Past Lives – is increasingly diluted. Song relies on what she seems to believe is the emotive power of in-yeon, and on her lead actors, to pump up a rather undernourished script. Nora is a writer in the vaguest terms. When other kids at school ask why her family is emigrating, Na Young replies that ‘Koreans don’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature’; in answers to questions from Hae Sung in later years, she jokes that she has adjusted her ambitions to winning a Pulitzer, later a Tony. She drops the names of major awards more often than she talks about her writing. It’s essentially the same with Arthur – Song proves he’s a novelist by showing him at a book-signing. Writers these days are unlikely to pound the keys of manual typewriters or chain-smoke as they do so; film-makers are evidently struggling to come up with replacement clichés anything like as good.
On the same evening that he leaves New York, Hae Sung goes to Nora’s apartment and meets Arthur for the first time. The three of them go out to eat and eventually we get back to the bar scene that opened Past Lives. Up to this point, halting conversations have been the order of the day – between Nora and Arthur (to signal that their marriage is uneasy), as well as between her and Hae Sung. Suddenly, at the bar, the Koreans are in full flow: Nora and Hae Sung don’t even wait for Arthur to disappear to the loo before starting their heart to heart – which is conducted, in order that ‘the white guy’ is thoroughly excluded, in Korean (even though we’ve also just heard that Arthur knows a bit of the language). Back at the apartment afterwards, Hae Sung invites the couple to visit him in South Korea some time and phones for an Uber. Nora goes out to wait with him on the street. They stare longingly at each other before speculating whether they may be experiencing a past life or what their future lives together may hold. I was relieved when the car arrived.
Greta Lee’s beauty and presence certainly impose themselves on the film but that deliberate gaze which concludes Song’s prologue isn’t the only time that Lee is very aware of the camera; I preferred Teo Yoo’s more subtly expressive work. As in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019), John Magaro comes over as a capable naturalistic actor but a dull one. In the screen version of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2015), the heroine, Eilis, who has returned temporarily to her native Ireland, must choose between resuming married life in New York and staying put, between forsaking her devoted Italian-American husband and disappointing her sensitive, better-off Irish suitor, who also loves her. Eilis is fond of both men and the actors concerned, under John Crowley’s skilful direction, make you care about all three characters: whatever Eilis decides, it’s bound to make for a poignant ending. So it does, yet you leave the cinema exhilarated because of how well and engagingly the story has been told. Past Lives is being widely praised but for this viewer it had almost exactly the reverse effect of Brooklyn. I didn’t get much out of spending time with Celine Song’s principals. I emerged from the film in rather low spirits – indifferent to what happened to Nora, Hae Sung or Arthur, in this life or the next.
3 October 2023
