PAST LIVES ***1/2
Celine Song2023
IDEA: Nora and Hae Sung, former childhood friends from South Korea, negotiate their evolving relationship after reuniting 24 years later in New York City, where Nora now lives a married life.
BLURB: The problem with mental games of “what if?” is that there’s no way of knowing how any unrealized opportunity might have affected one’s life had it been pursued. To follow the thread of speculation is to become consumed by an endless and ultimately unproductive process of ruminating about events that can never be changed. Celine Song’s Past Lives is such a profound and poignant rendering of this scenario not merely because of the “what if?” at its center, but because of its acknowledgment of the existential truths that underly the question: that making any choice entails the narrowing of others, and that life is a stochastic thing no-one can mastermind. Would Nora be questioning her marriage to Arthur if Hae Sung hadn’t reentered her life? Does she really desire this lost friend, or the nostalgic ideas of childhood and country he represents? Can those things even be separated? Song’s nuanced script rejects the monistic, teleological Western concept of “one true love,” embracing instead a kind of Buddhist circularity that opens room for multiplicity and emotional ambivalence. She elegantly articulates the asymmetries inherent between any two people, suggesting geographic, psychological, and affective distances via long panning shots and pregnant pauses. Past Lives often evokes Ozu and Edward Yang in both its patient filmmaking and its generous attitude toward life’s bittersweet compromises; like many of their works, it’s a melancholic tone poem that refuses to be a tragedy.
IDEA: Nora and Hae Sung, former childhood friends from South Korea, negotiate their evolving relationship after reuniting 24 years later in New York City, where Nora now lives a married life.
BLURB: The problem with mental games of “what if?” is that there’s no way of knowing how any unrealized opportunity might have affected one’s life had it been pursued. To follow the thread of speculation is to become consumed by an endless and ultimately unproductive process of ruminating about events that can never be changed. Celine Song’s Past Lives is such a profound and poignant rendering of this scenario not merely because of the “what if?” at its center, but because of its acknowledgment of the existential truths that underly the question: that making any choice entails the narrowing of others, and that life is a stochastic thing no-one can mastermind. Would Nora be questioning her marriage to Arthur if Hae Sung hadn’t reentered her life? Does she really desire this lost friend, or the nostalgic ideas of childhood and country he represents? Can those things even be separated? Song’s nuanced script rejects the monistic, teleological Western concept of “one true love,” embracing instead a kind of Buddhist circularity that opens room for multiplicity and emotional ambivalence. She elegantly articulates the asymmetries inherent between any two people, suggesting geographic, psychological, and affective distances via long panning shots and pregnant pauses. Past Lives often evokes Ozu and Edward Yang in both its patient filmmaking and its generous attitude toward life’s bittersweet compromises; like many of their works, it’s a melancholic tone poem that refuses to be a tragedy.
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