At age 12, Nora and Hae Sung go on a first date. Their complicity is obvious. However, Nora left South Korea shortly after for Canada with her parents. Twelve years later, the two young adults reconnect thanks to social networks. She lives in New York, where she aspires to be a playwright, while he completes his engineering studies in Seoul. It’s as if they had spoken the day before.
Troubled by this virtual relationship which is not romantic, but certainly more than friendly, Nora takes a step back. Twelve more years pass… Partly inspired by the life of filmmaker Celine Song, Past Lives is an impossible love story of incredible delicacy and subtlety.
A playwright like her heroine, Celine Song has built wonderful characters for whom she has written dialogues full of acuity, and whose realism is gladly colored with poetry. When Hae Sung recalls Nora crying all the time as a child, she reminds him that he was the only one who could comfort her. She says she doesn’t cry anymore. ” For what ? ” he asks. “When we immigrated, I cried a lot, but no one didn’t care, so I stopped. »
Between Nora and Hae Sung, it’s as if it’s time for confidence…
Throughout, Celine Song asks a whole host of fascinating questions through the mouths of her characters. There is for example this scene where Hae Sung asks Nora if, in the event that she did not leave Seoul, they would have married or not. Then separated, or not. They will never know. From then on, their exchanges are imbued with a note of regret, even melancholy, all the more difficult to dismiss as it is not based on anything tangible.
And Nora to marry Arthur, an author she sincerely loves, and with whom she has a lot in common… Conversely, Hae Sung and her are always poles apart. When she was a studious and ambitious student, he partied between classes. Now she’s more relaxed than before, and he’s more uptight.
However, when they end up being in the presence of each other, this invisible connection that unites them is palpable. It is unavowable, but irrepressible. It is complicated. Painfully complicated.
Exquisite images
Although Past Lives being her first film, Celine Song demonstrates an uncommon mastery of cinematographic language. His sense of the image is exquisite: all these nocturnal urban panoramas, this rural twilight with pastel skies and backlit silhouettes, a nod to Gone with the Wind (Gone with the wind)…
In a perfect crescendo, Celine Song manages to translate the amorous tension at work through meaningful compositions, such as this close-up of Nora and Hue Sung’s hands almost, but not quite, touching in the subway: c is electric. This moment, brief but significant, is superbly brought, while we see in the background Nora and Hue Sung through a window of a wagon, itself framed by another window, in the foreground.
This mise-en-abîme motif is recurrent in the film. It becomes metanarrative when Arthur, Nora’s spouse, notes that in a classic story, he would be the antagonist who prevents the protagonists from living their love story. Nora’s response, which will be kept silent, is an additional manifestation of Celine Song’s sensitivity.
It should also be noted that Arthur and Hue Sung turn out to be male characters of emotional maturity as we often see in life, but rarely in cinema.
sadness and catharsis
In a Hollywood film, we would know how all this will be linked and concluded. Except that Past Lives is not a Hollywood film, and that nothing about it is agreed or predictable. It’s a fair, true, and above all wildly romantic film; a film that, for lack of a better phrase, is honest in its way of arousing emotions.
Moreover, without saying too much, we will specify that at some point, Nora will let herself cry again. Impossible not to imitate him. It’s sad, but cathartic. It is complicated. Beautifully complicated.