Past Lives

Past Lives, the uncommonly assured feature film debut of playwright and Amazon streaming screenwriter Celine Strong, withholds its most obviously dramatic developments - the sort of moments that a lesser piece might construct explosive gear shifts around - then only refers to them in shy, past-tensed enquiries, years after they have taken place. Greta Lee's Nora, then going by Na Young, and Teo Yoo's Hae Sung formed a connection in their shared childhood; a first crush when they were both on the cusp of becoming teenagers. The pair walked a similar route home after school every day, a well-trodden track on which they would bicker and discuss their competing academic achievements. There's an obvious and easy rapport between the two, one picked up on by the children's mothers who arrange an idyllic playdate for them in a park. Even though both Na Young and Hae Sung carry umbrellas, it's not clear that it's actually raining. Any meteorological blemish on these perfect moments not quite penetrating the record of this foundational memory then. 

Nora and her family emigrate from South Korea to Canada not long afterwards, leaving Hae Sung in a desultory sort of repose that seems to last throughout the young man's adolescence and into early adulthood. Twelve years later the two reconnect through social media and Skype, quickly resuming the same sort of rhythms that defined their adolescent relationship. The length of this long-distance relationship is slippery: it could be months or a matter of weeks but it's obviously, painfully, significant in both of their lives. When it becomes clear, due to clashing work commitments, that a physical meeting will continue to be elusive, Na Young (now going by her chosen, Anglicized name Nora) asks for an end to the calls. A decade later, when discussing her and Hae Sung's relationship with her husband, played by John Magaro, this videophone era is pointedly elided. Nora preferring instead to talk almost exclusively in terms of them being childhood sweethearts. It's clear that this re-connection was deeply significant though. Both behave as if they are grieving when it ends, the couple quickly blundering into different relationships with varying degrees of success. 

When Nora and Hae Sung do eventually meet-up they are both in their mid-thirties and deeply entangled with other people. As they walk under a bridge while on their tour of New York, Shabier Kirchner's camera adopts a telephoto perspective. At first it seems as if this viewpoint has been chosen to evoke the idea of spying, as if we are watching on from some creeping vantage point as two celebrities enjoy a clandestine meeting, one charged with a potential for infidelity. The more the two talk though the more information, and therefore unaddressed longing, we are privy to. Nora had returned to Korea previously we learn, she had also tried to re-establish contact with Hae Sung. She did so while introducing her prospective husband to her family. The unspoken insinuation then being that she was indirectly asking Hae Sung to intervene and talk her out of this marriage. Since writer-director Song has decided not to dramatize these developments, we can only know about them if the characters talk about them. Past Lives' strength is that this coded demand for an explanation of inaction is completely consistent with both of these characters. Nora does, to some degree, see herself as the subject in a swirling fiction; Hae Sung is much more gently romantic, seemingly content to have simply let this other, wonderful person touch on his own ordinary life.