La Douleur Exquise of Unrealised Lives
My Review of Past Lives
M. D. Kwak
THE LIVES WE CREATE IN OUR HEADS TEND TO BE OUR MOST BEAUTIFUL ONES, for they are the lives that could have been but never were, the lives that we are separated from by just a layer of choice.
They’re the lives that give birth to our quixotic daydreams which meander listlessly through the wondrous possibilities of ‘what ifs’, only to dissipate into a gentle sunshower of bittersweet nostalgia, each droplet tainted with the knowledge of futility.
Past Lives explores this idea with a deceptively simple premise. The film opens in a bar (as all good movies do), showing the three leads engaged in conversation from afar. A narrative voice – perhaps our own – speculates upon the nature of their relationship: who’s married to who? As the camera slowly zooms onto Nora (Greta Lee), it cuts, and we’re now 24 years ago in South Korea when Nora/Na-young and Hae-sung (Teo Woo) are childhood friends-turning-into-lovers. The flashback is quintessentially youthful and unashamedly Korean, but it’s not an idealised fantasy either. Nora’s family immigrates to Canada because, according to her, “Koreans don’t win Nobel prizes” and Hae-sung, hurt by her sudden departure, cannot bring himself to properly farewell her before she leaves.
Years later, Nora, who now lives in New York, reconnects online with Hae-sung, who has spent years looking for her. The two begin talking over Skype and despite their palpable chemistry, they’re unable to reunite and the unfulfilled yearning for one another is too great to bear. They cut off contact and their lives continue on different paths. In the present, Hae-sung comes to America to visit Nora, who is now married to Arthur (played by John Magaro).
It’s a quiet film (some would even say lethargic), characterised by an uncanny sparseness in its dialogue and disciplined restraint in how it paces its action. It shies away from those melodramatic climaxes and frenzied outbursts of violent human emotion that edgy art critics and film awards seem to laud over in our contemporary filmic space (looking at you Saltburn). Yet, Celine Song’s dictatorial debut captured me in a way that no other film has for a long time. It’s with this meticulous nuance and refreshing tranquillity that Song paints a self-portrait of the human condition in its most authentic form. Because at its core, Past Lives is a romance film with a grounded realism more akin to a documentary; an existential exploration of unrealised love and one’s shifting cultural self, a wistful love letter to our past lives, and a life-affirming acceptance of the choices that have shaped who we are today.
Jenelle Riley of Variety writes: “In a medium where drama comes from adults behaving like children, the filmmaker asks another question. How can we find drama in three people trying to do their best to not hurt each other?” As Song notes, “It would be so much easier if Arthur was a jerk, or if Hae-sung was possessive and came to New York to ruin Nora’s life. Or if Nora felt she wasn’t loved enough and behaved immaturely.”
The bittersweet sequence in which Hae-sung and Nora explore New York is idyllic yet fraught with sub-textual tension. And this tension is crushing, not because of the classic A24 mind-trip, but because of its tender awkwardness, the crinkled eyes through which our two subjects gaze longfully and knowingly at each other. There’s a quiet undercurrent of melancholy that the two actors, both immigrants in real life, convey so masterfully as their characters relive the past, they once inhabited with each other, only to arrive at the poignant reality of the present. To one another, Nora and Hae-sung aren’t just childhood crushes; they encapsulate a whole world of possibility, a starkly different kind of life that exists only in the realm of sporadic fantasy. As Nora notes in a comedic, yet painfully awkward scene with her husband, everything about Hae-sung’s existence, from his masculinity to the way he talks or acts, reminds her of the Korea she left behind, the Korea which she still longs for with a tiny part of her being.
But Nora’s Korean self has faded away. We see this in subtle ways, like how Nora speaks Korean in a slow, awkward way, with an accent barely recognisable to Western audiences but meaningful to the Korean ear. Indeed, when Arthur expresses his (quite justifiable) insecurities to Nora, she reassures him that she feels more American than Korean – of course she won’t throw away her entire life in New York to run off with Hae-sung.
There’s this meta-textual moment where Arthur compares himself to the canonical ‘evil white husband’ standing in the way of fated childhood lovers who have overcome time and space to be together. It’s all very Brechtian, but Past Lives doesn’t allow its situational drama to untether its characters from reality. Despite his jealousy, Arthur remains a mature husband who trusts Nora to farewell her childhood sweetheart.
Arthur, played by John Magaro
The film’s final scene is fittingly bathetic. As the two leads wait for Hae-sung’s taxi to arrive, they gaze at each other silently for what seems like an eternity: a moment of mamihlapinatapai. In any other romance movie, there would be some last-minute dialogue which then blooms into a passionate kiss. But there is no catharsis. This isn’t some romance movie; it’s real life. Nora walks back home by herself and as she cries into Arthur’s embrace, only then do the wave of emotions come crashing down. This bittersweet denouement offers closure, albeit painful. Nora realises just how much her 12-year-old self was loved and can say goodbye to the girl she left behind. Hae-sung could meet the woman his childhood sweetheart had become and farewell her properly. And Arthur can finally meet his wife as her cry-baby childhood self.
A bathetic farewell – awkwardly realistic.
We’re no longer the same person we were in our past lives. There comes a certain point where we must bid farewell to our past lives and bear the crushing weight of unrealised possibilities – an infinite recurring series of what-ifs? But as Nora remarks to Hae-sung, our past lives will forever exist in our memories – and sometimes that is good enough.