The word out of Sundance, this past January, was that Celine Song's debut feature "Past Lives" was an absolute masterpiece. One critic I'm friendly with maintained it wasn't just the best film at this year's festival, but the best film they had ever seen at Sundance, period. With every rapturous declaration, I gnashed my teeth further: While a great deal of Sundance was available to critics via the virtual portal, this film was one of the few exceptions. Its distributor, A24, had made it so, and were even more unwavering when it came to the flood of press requests for a screener after its premiere. It made a few brief rounds at Sundance in-person, and then the studio shut it down until months later, upon its release.
At the time, I was aggravated by this policy, but, now, having finally seen it, I think I understand their reasoning. As wonderful as it is, it's not the sort of awe-inspiring cavalcade of energy and ideas that, say "Everything Everywhere All At Once," another A24 film you might have heard of, was. As much as it earned critical canards by the bushel in Park City, I think it was wise for the studio to let the ground cool a bit before releasing the film to the rest of the world.
It offers echoes and reverberations, to be sure, but, in keeping with its Buddhist thematics, instead of a boulder splashing into a lake, it's more like a leaf, reddened by the lower temperatures of fall, gently gliding down upon an otherwise placid rain puddle.
Puddles actually factor into Song's film, as in the repeated imagery of them, reflecting darkened shapes and shadows, a gleaming surface that only exists in the ephemera. The story concerns a pair of characters, Nora (Greta Lee), and Hae Sung (Tee Yoo), who first meet as a couple of smitten school kids growing up in Seoul, and then, 12 years later as young adults, before finally meeting 12 years after that, in full adulthood.
In the beginning, Nora (played as a child by Moon Seung-ah), and Hae Sung (played as a child by Seung Min Yim), go on a supervised "date" together, with their mothers looking on admiringly. They enjoy each other's company, even as they desperately compete with each other for the best marks in class. When Nora and her family, including her artist mother (Ji Hye Yoon), and film director father (Won Young Choi), decide to immigrate to Toronto, the young girl makes no bones about her reasoning: A burgeoning writer, she wants to win a Nobel Prize, and figures she can't do it as a kid in Korea. She abruptly leaves her friends and classmates, including a stung Hae Sung, who unceremoniously tells her "Bye" when he walks with her to her parents' house one last time.
From there, we shoot ahead 12 years, as Nora has now just moved to New York, to pursue her playwriting career. Out of the blue, she gets word via social media that Hae Sung has been trying to get back in touch with her, and she reaches out to him. From there, they engage in an intense virtual relationship, mostly via Skype (as a dating mechanism, the tech they use is as tell-tale as any phony facial hair component), surprised at first at how quickly they fall back into their rhythms together.
But they are worlds apart, both geographically, as Hae Sung is still in Seoul, as well as in their careers: Nora plans to go to an artist retreat for many weeks, Hae Sung plans to travel to China in order to learn Mandarin, over the summer. Rather than be forced to wait for each other, or put their fledgling careers on hold, Nora makes the decision to take a time out for a while, in order to get the rest of her life in order, a turn of events that again leaves Hae Sung despondent, but accepting.
Once again, we move 12 years ahead. Now, Nora is married to Arthur (John Magaro), a sweet Jewish writer whom she met at the artist's retreat a dozen years before, and has settled into her life. Still, when Hae Sung contacts her about visiting New York, at last, and getting to see her again, she can't refuse.
Despite the kind of film this lengthy setup might indicate, it's hardly a dramatic love triangle dirge: Nora is perfectly happy with Arthur, even if he somewhat neurotically still can't believe his luck, and Hae Sung, as lovelorn as he might be, seems to accept his fate with equanimity. Instead, it's a film primarily about in-yun, the Korean concept of providence that Nora attempts to explain to Arthur when they first meet. The idea is that we all lead many, many layers of lives (in this way, actually a bit of a shading of "EEAAO," after all), and that our spirits meet each other over and over again, in different configurations.
In this life, then, Nora and Hae Sung are not together, but almost were; in other lives, maybe they were married for 60 years, or one was a cat and the other a bird the cat was hunting. The idea is to try and take the long view of existence, so that the disappointments and crushing defeats of one life, can be seen as a smaller piece of a much larger and longer timeline.
The film works in quiet multitudes, never hanging on a moment too long, or making one idea more precious than another. It's built around conversations, which happen in many forms, almost continuously, in distant shots of characters as small specks in a larger screen, or in silhouette as the sun turns their faces to deep shadows, or the intimate, dim light of a couples' bedroom in the evening, looking at each other in a kind of twilight.
There are no villains here -- despite Arthur's protestation that in the movie of their story, he would be seen as the "evil white American" keeping the couple everyone is pulling for away from each other. Arthur might be a bit of a nebbish, someone you might not take terribly seriously (at a book signing, we see the name of his novel is "Boner"), but he's also not someone you root against, either.
Even Hae Sung, upon finally meeting him, admits he feels worse when he sees what a decent person he is. Pointedly, Arthur has no intention of getting in the way of the pair of old friends spending time together, even if it means having to sit in a bar next to Nora and Hae Sung, as they have an entire conversation in Korean, a language he doesn't understand.
The two men do rotate in orbit around Nora, one way or the other, but they are just forces in her life, energies that trick and twist, and get led by her to their eventual destinations. In Song's impossibly adept debut, she's able to find balance and harmony in the chaos of an ever-surging society. Perhaps it was this quality that left so many Sundance critics besotted so thoroughly, the idea that our struggles and failures might eventually get evened out on our soul's spiritual journey.
Liberated: Something keeps drawing Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Tee Yoo) back together in "Past Lives."