Past Lives review: A classic for this life and those yet to come

For every film occupying the corners of my mind, there’s one iconic shot that stays with me long after the former has slowly burned itself onto my consciousness. For Past Lives, however, I was left clutching at an endless carousel of memorable frames. And then, I settled on the final scene, a quiet, simmering tearjerker that I would like to keep in the same memory box as Kapurush (1965), Satyajit Ray’s lesser-discussed film about past lovers getting reacquainted and finding themselves in a fraught present, and Before Sunrise (1995), Richard Linklater’s cult heartbreaker.

For a film that’s so fraught with possibilities for romance and is yet so emotionally mature, it almost feels like a superhuman debut for director Celine Song. It tells the story of Nora, an aspiring Korean American playwright engaged at a writers’ residency in New York City. One day, on a whim, the 24-year-old runs a social media search for a cherished childhood companion in Seoul, her ‘home’ that she emigrated out of, twelve years ago. Back home, the boyfriend, named Hae Sung, has made similar efforts, and in no time, the two find each other via Facebook. As the long-lost friends reconnect over endless video calls, she plunges into feverish melancholia. What transpires over the course of the next twelve years, in a superbly executed time leap, forms the rest of the film.

Korean cinema has given the world phenomenal global cinematic masterpieces in the past two decades (Memories of Murder; Oldboy, 2003; Burning, 2018; Parasite, 2019; and Decision to Leave, 2022, are among my personal favourites), and Past Lives is a worthy successor of that legacy with its meditative take on the genre of the love story. After she finds Hae Sung, Nora almost latches on to him, like a child to a straw, sucking greedily on a reservoir of memories that has been lost for too long. Lovesickness winds itself around homesickness, and realising the hazards of this newfound, almost-consumptive affliction, Nora cuts the correspondence short one day. “It’ll be over before you know it,” she says. He is distraught but she knows leaving too well.

Song proceeds to probe the fresh wound, having her freshly broken-up protagonist bump into a stubbly-faced Jewish youth at her writers’ residency. As he walks up into the foreground, hands in pockets, you know Arthur is the love of Nora’s new life. For they are destined to be, by way of ‘inyeon’ — the Korean equivalent of kismet and connection — as Nora proffers to him later into their rendezvous. They have made it after 8,000 lives of chance encounters, to be together finally. He asks if she really believes it. It’s just something Koreans say to seduce someone, she answers. And then, another time leap.

Past Lives is autobiographical, with Song, who also started out as a playwright (like Nora), herself having left South Korea for Canada as a 12-year-old. This is the 34-year-old director transplanting into the film’s familiar milieu, her own identity and memory as an expatriate displaced from her culture and roots as well as the distinct South Korean experience that has frozen and gotten lodged addresslessly in the protagonist’s mind somewhere. Nostalgia can be a lethal emotion, and Song’s mastery of it as a storytelling device enables her to slowly saturate the story’s loins with a longing that she herself has probably known for aeons. And when she finally slits them open, it is with one tender but decisive cut. Against my better instincts, I remember giving into wondering: who between the two men would Nora pick, Hae Sung or Arthur?

In act three, Arthur is Nora’s diffident, childlike and endearingly vulnerable husband. Played by a skittish John Magaro (First Cow, 2020), Arthur is indeed the love of Nora’s present life, even if he finds it hard to believe, as he murmurs into her ear as they go to bed one night. Raw and headstrong in his decision to fly “thirteen hours” to meet her, Hae Sung becomes Arthur’s inevitable rival, embodying the traditional ideal of masculinity from the world Nora comes from. “You dream in a language I don’t know. There’s a place inside of you where I can’t go,” he whimpers. Magaro makes Arthur’s fragility and self-sabotaging self-awareness his own, portraying a man who in this love triangle has given up on himself but not on his wife. In the closing moments of the film, when Hae Sung comes over for a parting dinner, the long pause Arthur takes before greeting him back in Korean is probably among the finest exchanges between two characters you will see in a long time.

Both Song and the film’s leads have spoken about the processes they followed to exhibit an organic, precise familiarity with each other’s characters in the film, and it is during these moments that you realise how persuasive a genuinely told story can be. When they reunite in New York, 24 years after they last saw each other, all Nora and Hae Sung can manage is endless ‘wahs’ before allowing themselves the release of the hug. It is precisely in ways such as these that Song’s storytelling hits you right in the feels. So, despite not exactly approving of Hae Sung’s orthodox ways and cultural conditioning, she allows herself to be charmed and awed by this souvenir from her homeland, this antique key that has finally made her way into her head and unlocked the memory box.

Greta Lee and Teo Yoo are measured and flowing in their respective moments. Lee, famous as Maxine in the Netflix series Russian Doll, exhibits her range effortlessly, playing first a lost artist pining for her roots and then a collected and pragmatic modern woman who can allow herself to contemplate life’s what-ifs and comfort Na Young, the 12-year-old crybaby she was forced to abandon many years ago. Her portrayal of Nora has both, amazement at the lengths Hae Sung has gone for their bond and kindness for their closure-deprived childhoods.

Yoo, who was born in Germany and educated in the UK and the US, embraces the naivety and artlessness of his character with the method actor’s finesse. He is particularly compelling in a brilliantly shot scene at Brooklyn Bridge Park, where the camera pans across the foliage and the screens registers the conversation Nora and Hae Sung make about his life in South Korea. The actors slowly walk into the panning frame, as Nora attempts to console Hae Sung, who’s recently had his heart broken. There isn’t a better way for cinematographer Shabier Kirchner to stress that whatever inyeon Nora and Hae Sung had accumulated, has been exhausted in their past lives. They must take a long look at each other, say their byes — and begin again.