Sophia Michaels
The 2020 Sundance Film Festival proved to be the last major movie event before Covid-19 knocked the Earth off its axis. More than merely washing the bad taste of Cats out of our mouths, the fest — which ran from Jan. 23 to Feb. 2 — showcased a plethora of exciting (sorta) independent films and emerging talents. Audiences took in stirring documentaries like Dick Johnson Is Dead and Boys State, breakout turns from Aubrey Plaza (Black Bear) and Taylour Paige (Zola), and future awards-hopefuls Promising Young Woman and Never Rarely Sometimes Always. But one film stood out among the pack, a finely etched immigrant saga capturing a Korean family adapting to life in the American South: Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari. After taking home Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award, Chung’s film would go on to receive six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.
This year marked the first in-person Sundance since the pandemic hit. And the film that’s risen to the fore is, again, an autobiographical tale of a Korean chasing their American dream while reconciling the past with the present.
Past Lives opens on the outskirts of Seoul, as 12-year-old Na Young (Seung-ah Moon), an aspiring writer and social pariah, forges a bond with her classmate Hae Sung (Seung-min Yim). Theirs is a special understanding. An ease of motion. He comforts her when she cries; she ensures him he isn’t as ordinary as he thinks he is. They walk home every day from school, discussing their futures. Hers is to win a Nobel Prize; he isn’t so sure what he wants. Is it a romantic connection? Perhaps. But they are so terribly young, who knows. Maybe kindred spirits. They go on “a date,” consisting of running about a sculpture garden. It is there that Na Young’s mother informs Hae Sung’s that the family is moving to Canada, and whatever relationship their children have will soon come to an end.
Twelve years later, Na Young is now Nora (Greta Lee), a young playwright scraping by in New York City. She discovers that Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) posted on her father’s Facebook page asking where she is. Though they haven’t spoken since that childhood goodbye, he’s been searching for her. Intrigued, and seeing him as a bridge to a culture she’s left behind, they start video chatting. That sense of ease they once had appears to return, and it becomes a daily routine. It doesn’t hurt that he looks good, even more handsome and strapping than before. She learns he’s an engineering student who’s completed his mandatory military service. When she finds herself falling for him, however, she cuts Hae Sung off, choosing to prioritize her work over a faraway man she can’t visit for at least a year. He’s enrolled in a summer engineering program in China, while she’s headed to Montauk on a writing retreat.
At that retreat she meets Arthur (John Magaro), a mellow Jewish fella. They hit it off, and she introduces him to the concept of inyeon (인연), or the ties that bind two people over the course of their lives (destiny, in other words). It’s the film’s unifying principle, that forces of fate guide our encounters and suggest path crossing in prior incarnations. And it compels Past Lives’ sweetest scene: a bedtime heart-to-heart between Nora and Arthur about her roots, and his worry that he’ll never be able to provide her cultural nourishment.
Another twelve years pass, and Hae Sung, a single engineer living in Seoul, visits New York City. He wants to see Nora, although the two haven’t talked since their video courtship — and she is now married to Arthur, and contentedly so. They reunite and walk around the city. That ease returns. She finds him “masculine” in “a Korean way,” which Arthur most certainly isn’t. Is it inyeon that brought them together again?
Past Lives is the feature directorial debut of Celine Song, a New York playwright (Endlings) whose story mirrors Nora’s. She moved to Canada at the age of 12, before receiving her MFA from Columbia University in 2014. According to Song, the film — an A24 release — was inspired by a talk she had at bar situated between her current lover and her ex, a scene that rather beautifully bookends the film. And you can tell it’s a highly personal story, one that Song is in total command of. More is spoken in the film’s quietest moments than some entire movies. There is an intimacy to the material that feels warmly familiar. Philosophical musings about life and love, while strolling Seoul or New York City, recall Richard Linklater’s Before films.
This doesn’t feel like a first film. Song’s confident and sensitive direction, combined with director of photography Shabier Kirchner’s lyrical compositions — the wind slowly pushing Nora’s white window curtains inward, signaling the arrival of Arthur; her splintered reflection in a murky pond; two young lovers silhouetted amid a copse at twilight — and a stringy score, courtesy of Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rosen and Christopher Bear, denote a level of refinement that can only come with experience, or maybe a surfeit of talent. And what a talent Song is. I can’t wait to see what she does next. And the same goes for Lee who, after weathering some caricatural Asian roles (see: Girls, New Girl), has finally been given one worthy of her considerable ability. She imbues Nora with a poise and self-assuredness that feels far too alien in romantic dramas.
There is a version of Past Lives where Nora must choose between her two lovers. Thankfully, Song and Lee have far loftier ambitions.
“I was just thinking about the type of woman at the center of this kind of movie, and what that prototype usually is,” Lee told Vulture, “and personally longing for something different where you see a woman in this scenario who’s entirely certain about what she wants, and her ambitions, and her dreams, because it’s not about her identity getting formed by which guy she ends up with.”
