Artwork by Michael DiMilo
The Power of Love: Film Review of Past Lives
By Geoff Carter
★★★★☆
The mythos surrounding love, infatuation, and desire is woven throughout the fabric of human existence. Classic romances like Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Orpheus and Eurydice, or Wuthering Heights only begin to tell love’s grand story. This story is everywhere. It permeates literature, theater, television (God save us from the Hallmark Channel(s)), telenovelas, and film.
Celine Song’s brilliant debut film, Past Lives, is an elegant and beautifully symmetric tale of two people separated by an ocean, time, and circumstances whose love endures beyond all these barriers. But this only scratches the surface. This narrative also incorporates the notion on ineyon, a Korean term defining a special attraction between two people, that—according to Ms. Song, is when, “”you are connected to each other in lives before this one and also that you will be connected in the lives after this one. And in every lifetime, it’s going to mean something a little different.” (Newsweek:What is Inyeon?)
So, inyeon seems to be sort of a love at first sight, a type of personal fate, and a kind of bond lasting through eternity. As the foundation of Past Lives, inyeon is the fulcrum on which the relationship of its two main characters, Nora Moon (Greta Lee), and Hae Sung (Tea Yoo) is balanced. From their childhood friendship to later reconnections through Skype and finally, a face-to-face meeting twenty-four years after their initial separation, their relationship seems to move in an ever-narrowing circle, a closing ring of fate.
The film begins in 2000, when twelve-year-old classmates Nora and Hae begin to grow close to each other. Although they are very young, their attraction seems to have more gravity than a typical middle-school crush. Seeing the attraction, Nora’s mother arranges a “date” between the two, explaining to Hae’s mom that she wants to create good memories for Nora, as they will be immigrating to Canada soon. Her classmates give Nora a farewell, but after discovering she is leaving, Hae, apparently deeply upset, walks her home as usual, but says nothing until he drops her off with a cursory goodbye.
Twelve years pass, and Nora discovers Hae has been looking for her online. They reconnect and start conversing as if it were yesterday. One of Song’s strengths as a director is the extraordinary performances, she coaxes from her two principal actors. Lee and Yoo display a chemistry that is so relaxed and genuine, it’s sometimes difficult to remember this is artifice. When the characters Nora and Hae talk—or don’t talk—it is as if they are connecting on a transcendent, almost sublime, level. Yet it is Nora who pushes Hae away. After Skyping for some time and promising each other they will visit, she tells Hae that it is time for them to take a break. She tells him she cannot go back to Korea without establishing herself in New York, saying that she’s immigrated twice and will not go back before accomplishing this.
Nora travels to a writer’s retreat where she meets another author, Arthur Zaturansky (John Magaro), with whom she falls in love. During their time there, she explains the concept of inyeon to him, that two people who have that attraction may have to meet eight thousand times in past and future lives before they are truly right for each other. Arthur is charmed by this—and Nora. They marry and establish themselves as writers in New York City while Hae travels to China to learn Mandarin.
Twelve more years pass. Nora and Arthur seem to have become relatively successful authors. Hae has become an engineer but has broken up with his girlfriend. He contacts Nora, saying he will be coming to New York to visit. Needless to say, Arthur is a little apprehensive. When the two meet in the park after over twenty years of being apart, their feelings have not faded; on the contrary, they seem stronger than ever.
On the surface, this seems as if it could be a rather mundane and banal sort of love story. Its plot of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy comes back for girl has been used, more than a few times, on the Hallmark Channel, but Past Lives is not a plot-driven vehicle. It is not about glamorous people or dramatic break-ups or devastating misunderstandings. It’s about a man and a woman who have an undeniable and inextinguishable attraction that they know goes beyond them.
When Nora first speaks of inyeon, the fate of attraction, she mentions it as a curiosity, not a belief, yet when she and Hae meet, talk about their past, their present, and their futures, Nora implies that they have not experienced each other in enough past lives to make the present work, an assertion that is supported by the fact she has chosen to pursue her own life in New York City rather than return to Korea. Although she cannot deny the strength of their attraction, she refuses to subsume her identity to it. Nora knows—she always knew—what she wants in her life, to be a great author, to move to New York, and to win the Nobel Prize.
Hae does not fit into these ambitions. The fact that she chooses the path her life will take seems to contradict the inyeon, at least until she explains to Hae that their attraction has to pass through eight thousand iterations before it can be fulfilled. Whether this is her way of rationalizing her choices to Hae—or herself—Nora will not be drawn from her chosen path.
Past Lives is a slyly unassuming film. The protagonists look like everyday people living in an ordinary world. Their apartments are regular-sized Brooklyn living spaces. In the sequences that take place in Korea, the parks, schools, neighborhoods, and homes are very commonplace, even mundane. Whether the director chooses these sets to highlight the chemistry in their relationship or to emphasize the everyday quality of this experience (after all, almost everyone falls in love), it adds an extra sprinkling of charm to an already charming film.
The acting is nothing short of brilliant. The almost palpable magnetism between Hae and Nora, even over the internet, carries the film. They communicate more with simple looks than others could with pages of dialogue. By comparison, Nora’s relationship with Arthur seems a little flat, but more measured. In a brilliantly written sequence, Arthur tells Nora she talks in her sleep, but only speaks Korean. He says that he feels excluded from that part of her, that he can never know her dreams.
Near the end of the film, Nora, Hae, and Arthur are sitting at a bar and talking. Nora begins translating the conversation between her and Hae but eventually speaks solely to him, leaving Arthur on the outside, lost in translation, the same as when Nora talks in her sleep. When she leaves to go to the restroom, Hae and Arthur speak, and Hae says the two of them have a sort of ineyon, too. The story becomes a circle.
At the very beginning of Past Lives, the camera focuses in on these three at the bar and the audience hears people speculating as to the relationship between Hae, Nora, and Arthur—who’s with who and who wants what. All speculation. Yet, only after seeing the film and returning to this scene, the beginning of the circle, does its symmetry become apparent. Everything repeats, round and round and round, much like the carousel Hae and Nora sit near in Brooklyn Park.
Love is eternal, like the seasons. It blooms, it fades, it dies. Ineyon is a reflection of this cycle, of this mythos, of our lives.