How Can You Love Me Now As You Had Said You Loved Me Yesterday?: A Review of Celine Song’s Past Lives (2023)
Last summer, I watched what I believed to be one of the best films to come out of the year 2023. In her directorial debut, Korean-Canadian playwright, Celine Song captures an interesting perspective on how love and identity can transform over the course of a person’s life. Past Lives, follows a young Korean playwright – based loosely off Song herself – as she is confronted with having to choose between a love from her past and the love from her present, and asks audiences to consider the forms in which love shapes, breaks, and re-shapes us back into the people we have become and will continue to become as we grow old.
The film’s plot is grounded by one evocative question: does the love sparked within a past version of who we once were exist long enough within us to be re-ignited? Past Lives does well to answer this question through the concept of In-Yun, an ancient Buddhist concept which states that interactions between two people throughout their current lives are rewarded from interactions they each shared in a former life. The more two people interact, the stronger it is thought their bond was in a past life, with relationships that end in marriage being cited as having “eight thousand layers of In-Yun; over eight thousand life times”.
I still can’t quite comprehend how a film can so gently express the harsh realities of becoming unrecognisable to the people from your yesterday and your tomorrow, simultaneously. Yet, Song succeeds at every turn in how she depicts moments which involve doubt, selfishness, and pain, and allows these emotions to be felt as earnestly and deeply as passion, and joy, and the bittersweet taste of love by each of the characters in her story. I struggled to comprehend this when the credits rolled and I sat in the theatre bawling as feelings of dread and loneliness consumed me. I struggled to comprehend this on the train ride home after leaving the theatre, and the weeks following when I told anyone who would listen about a movie they just “had to see”. And now, this lack of comprehension sticks to me so strongly that I can’t seem to separate myself from this film.
.jpg)
Past Lives is broken into three decades that showcase the life and progression of – the film’s protagonist, Nora (Greta Lee) and the person she grows into from the ages of 12 and 36. Born Na-Young, we see a 12 year old as she is separated from her best friend Hae Sung, whose bond is so strong, everyone believes their connection to be a product of In-Yun. After her move to Canada, Na-Young becomes Nora Moon, and this name change causes her to lose contact with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who is still living in Korea. Twelve years pass, and Nora comes across a Facebook message that reveals Hae-Sung is looking to reconnect with her. His search is successful and the two attempt to make up for the time lost since Nora’s move; Hae Sung has just finished his military service and is about to start university in China and Nora is at the start of what soon turns into an incredibly successful career as a playwright in America. This reconnection is short lived when Nora feels herself revert back into someone she is no longer familiar with. The next we see of them together is another 12 years into the future – by this point, Nora is married to Arthur (John Magaro), an American author she met at her retreat, and Hae-Sung, engaged to a girl he dated throughout university, is now newly single.
Throughout Past Lives, I found strong similarities to Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry’s 2004 film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film shows scenes of Hae-Sung watching it for the first time, at Nora’s request. Each film focuses its plot on the journey of finding, and losing, and finding your soulmate, and the pain of remembering, forgetting, and re-remembering your love. Explored within their narratives is the theme of “right person, wrong time”, and each does their best to ask audiences if who we were when we were once loved is who we are always going to be? But, what Song does that Kaufman and Gondry do not, is subvert how we typically understand what makes true love true by reframing the cliche of the love triangle into a conversation that decentralises fate, and re-centralises choice. There is an unapologetic vulnerability to the nature of Nora, Arthur, and Hae Sung, that exudes throughout the film’s run time and that so delicately, yet complicatedly, weaves together the fabrics which connect them that is so narratively messy but still feels so human.
When Arthur admits to Nora that the reason he started learning Korean was because she sleep talks in her native language, “dream[ing] in a language [he] can’t understand”, we understand why he doubts that Nora feels for him what he does for her.
Or when Hae Sung looks into Nora’s eyes and says solemnly in Korean that he never imagined “liking [her] husband would hurt so much”, we can empathise with his inner desire to be hateful and selfish. And when Nora bids Hae Sung farewell, walks back to the apartment she shares with her husband while sobbing, we can admire the courage it took in realising that what is fated does not mean it is right – that because Arthur is the person she is choosing will be the love of her life, that in fact, does make him the love of her life.
The complexities written in Song’s three characters diverge away from the typically drawn paths within romantic dramas which narrate the sentiment that what is obviously the right choice means that it is the best choice. Instead, Past Lives establishes an alternative sentiment within the romantic genre that what is familiar is not always known. And, as unfortunate and unfair as it is, to be known in a past life or distant memory is not to be known in a potential life or future possibility. The emotional houses for which we foster our love is not what is or how it is known, but is what makes us feel known.