Past Lives (2023 | USA | 106 minutes | Celine Song)
The Past Lives hype that immediately saturated Sundance Twitter following its premiere in Park City was not fucking around. Since then it wowed SIFF audiences as the opening night feature and is now opening around the country, including here in Seattle.
It’s an artfully constructed, personally-inspired story, one that’s executed near-flawlessly by a first-time filmmaker from start to heart-rending finish. Celine Song opens her film with a minor mystery: a trio glimpsed across a warmly lit bar by strangers who we hear quietly speculating on their relationship to each other. It’s an endlessly compelling social game that we’ve all played from across a room. The overheard whisperers can’t quite figure it out, but a meaningful glance at the camera and a knowing smile from Greta Lee shatters the fourth wall to implicate the audience as curious onlookers while immediately piquing our attention.
The film spends the ensuing time answering that question with a hard cut back in time. We meet two members of the late night drinking party as children in Seoul, twenty-four years earlier. They’re close neighborhood friends, ambitious competitive classmates, intertwined in each other’s lives. One, Nora, is on the precipice of a major emigration. The other, Hae Sung, is about to be left behind. Although their parents plan a playdate to cement hometown memories, a sparkling lyrical sequence of clean light dancing through raindrops, the kids have no way of knowing just how powerful the gravitational forces of personal history will ripple across their lives.
Just as we’re becoming immersed in the pre-teen anxieties and concerns about moving to a whole new world (in this case, Toronto), the film takes a giant leap forward. We catch up a dozen years later, immersed in the disparate paths their lives have taken since parting on a hillside grossing. Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) is fresh off a compulsory army tour, studying something practical, and spending his evenings chugging Soju with friends; she’s a graduate student studying writing in New York played by Greta Lee. They’re in their early twenties and alive during the fleeting sliver of history when Facebook and Skype were fresh and new, complete with all the miraculous oddities of social media and the unexpected possibilities of reconnection with long-forgotten acquaintances. Song captures this time of precarious identity formation with gossamer yearning: new technology provides a life raft from lonely uncertainty, the intoxicating delight of a seemingly impossible connection, but also the danger of disappearing into a world of long-distance augmented make-believe. It can’t last forever, but the freedom of their virtual reunion punctuates a critical era and steers each onto their next paths. Once again, as we see a hint of where Nora’s heading — by way of an eventful stay at a Montauk writers’ retreat where she relates a traditional story of Korean story of recurring connections under twinkle-lights on a balmy summer evening — there’s another time jump.
By the time we catch up to the present, Song’s elegant structure has created full lives for Nora and Hae Sung with the most delicate touches. Each era is grounded in a deep sense of place and a specificity of character, so that when we find Nora on the precipice of an unexpected visit from Hae Sung, we share her anxious excitement about the reunion. It’s a tremendous debut, anchored by a knockout central performance by Greta Lee whose vibrance is perfectly counterbalanced by Teo Yoo’s staid uncertain longing. As the third leg of the trio, the ever-exceptional John Magaro can’t help but threaten to steal every scene he’s in. When they meet in the city, ever so gradually revealing the shapes their lives have taken and the delicate vibrations that animate the paths still ahead, we’re equally rapt to the the sprawling possibilities of what might unfold from their reunion. To say more might spoil one of the most compelling third acts and gracefully striking endings in recent memory. It’s altogether unsurprising that a first film is both so personal and deeply considered, but it’s an utter miracle that Celine Song pulls off this level of heart-tugging perfection while keeping her story of South Korean childhood sweethearts separated by decades and great distances so weightlessly unfussy. It was easily the best of Sundance and is likely to hold firm to a spot as one of the most swooningly romantic films of the entire year.
Past Lives arrives in local theaters on June 16, including a run at SIFF Cinema Uptown.
Header image courtesy A24.