“Past Lives – Nos vies d’avant”: Celine Song dissects a romantic connection spanning three decades in her first steps in cinema

“Past Lives – Our lives before” takes the time to describe the sentimental wanderings of two adults who loved each other when they were only children. Celine Song thus explores, what we rarely see in cinema, an emotion other than that of exile specific to emigration.

What does your love life look like when you feel like a door hasn’t completely closed? Korean-American director Celine Song responds with Past Lives – Our lives before in theaters December 13. The film, which is a critical success in the United States and has already won several awards, tells the story over three decades of the unique relationship between Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), the love of her twelve years. .

It was at this age that she emigrated to Canada with her parents, before settling in New York to become a playwright. Behind her, in South Korea, she left Hae Sung. About twenty years after having taken different paths, as in this scene where two distinct paths (a flat path and a staircase) present themselves to them in childhood, they find themselves again in the flesh in New York . Hae Sung came to visit Nora, now married. It is an opportunity for the two adults to question how their platonic romantic relationship could have evolved.

Time to digest your emotions

Past Lives – Our lives before takes the time to describe an emotional connection that endures. We first witness the confession of a teenage girl to her mother about her first romantic feelings. We then perceive the excitement of a young woman of 20 and the desire to put an end to a unclear situation. And, finally, the maturity of a thirty-year-old who has definitively imposed a direction on her loves by getting married.

In Celine Song’s feature film, the changes are driven by Nora – she is the one who must follow her family to Canada – and Hae Sung seems to suffer them. Especially since he does not always manage to fully express his feelings. Gestures, postures, attitudes and especially looks: Song’s camera captures the indescribable complicity that binds his heroes. And the places that witness it, filmed in detail, become markers of their sentimental wanderings in the cities that shelter them.

Loving friendship

For her first film, Celine Song was inspired by her own story. The scene, which opens the feature film and which allows her to depict this particular love thanks to a long flashback, she lived it. The filmmaker herself found herself in a New York bar, between her husband and her childhood sweetheart. The playwright’s narrative device is based on the alchemy between her actors at different stages of their lives. Thus, the candor, which allowed them to express their loving affection during childhood, will little by little give way to an embarrassment born from the fact that they understand the complexity of their relationship at a distance and, later, when Nora getting married. In the image, the close-up of their fingers intertwined at 12 years old, in Seoul, gives way to that of their hands, at 36 years old, which brush against each other in the New York subway while they do not leave each other’s side look, happy to see each other again.

By turns, hesitant and frank in the skin of their characters, Grace Lee and Teo Yoo (recently seen in the Korean romantic series I love to hate you on Netflix) remarkably convey their tensions. The director found two actors who perfectly illustrate the emotional connection to which the word refers “inyeon”, the common thread of the film. This Korean term can be translated as “providence” or “destiny”. This belief in the fact that they are linked in one way or another is the driving force behind Nora and Hae Sung, engaged in a complex but relatively peaceful relationship. This serenity, which settles in as the story evolves, infuses the trio formed with Nora’s husband, Arthur (John Magaro). The latter is obviously not fooled by the intensity of the relationship between his wife and his childhood sweetheart.

Past Lives – Our lives before also proves to be an original reflection on the diffuse traumas of exile that we often only approach from the angle of nostalgia alone when we can leave other types of emotions behind. To Hae Sung’s mother who asks her why she wants to start all over again in another country, Nora’s mother replies that it is a matter of making a calculation between what we lose and what we gain. For Nora and Hae Sung, it took two decades to complete this operation. And Celine Song offers them an imposing canvas, that of providence, to make their accounts.

The sheet

Gender : drama
Director: Celine Song
Distribution : Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro
Country : UNITED STATES
Duration : 1h46
Exit : December 13, 2023
Distributer : ARP Selection

Synopsis: At 12 years old, Nora and Hae Sung are childhood friends, platonic lovers. Circumstances separate them. At 20, chance reconnects them, for a time. At 30, they find themselves, adults, confronted with what they could have been, and with what they could become.