Past Lives (2023) ‘Sydney Film Festival’ Review: The past is something he could see, but not touch

Past Lives (2023) ‘Sydney Film Festival’ Review:

tamām ḳhāna-ba-doshoñ meñ mushtarak hai ye baat
sab apne apne gharoñ ko palaT ke dekhte haiñ

All those who live nomadic lives have this one thing in common;
Of looking back at who / what reminds them of home from time to time

– Iftikhar Arif

The English translation of this Urdu couplet by poet Iftikhar Arif barely scratches the surface of the meaning behind the original. For example, the phrase ḳhāna-ba-dosh (translated as ‘nomad’ in English) is a compound made up of two separate words of Farsi / Persian origin – ḳhāna, which means ‘house’ and dosh, which means ‘shoulder.’ Hence, a more literal translation of ḳhāna-ba-dosh would be ‘those who carry their houses on their shoulders.’ The word ‘nomad’ in English is perhaps a fair equivalent but doesn’t even come close to the evocativeness that the word ḳhāna-ba-dosh carries in Persian. 

And thus, we arrive at one of the central challenges of working with poetry in translation. Much of the time, there isn’t a direct equivalence for a phrase, its context, or its cultural connotation when removed from one language and trying to place it in another. How, then, do we best articulate the precise meaning of a phrase or a couplet from one language into another and balance that with the evocativeness of feeling and playfulness of language construction, such that the essence remains largely intact? It appears to be an impossible task.  

You might be wondering why did I open with this preface about poetry in translation for a review of Past Lives (2023)? Well, there are two reasons. Firstly, I believe this couplet by Iftikhar Arif goes to the heart of the feeling that the debut film by Writer-Director Celine Song is trying to grapple with. Secondly – the impossibility of doing complete justice to the original couplet when translating it into another language – mirrors the helplessness you feel when a film like Past Lives asks you to precisely articulate how you feel about it, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.

Language can often feel limiting as you try to articulate the precise textures and tenors of your inner feelings and emotions. At times, you believe that you’re, at best, a serviceable translator, putting your feelings into words. This problem gets compounded when you come up against a film such as Past Lives – a film that’s more concerned with what you feel about it and the emotion it leaves you with, as opposed to the structural artifice of how the beats play out. 

The film opens with a scene from a bar where our three main protagonists – a woman flanked by two men on either side – are busy in conversation at a bar table. You aren’t privy to the conversation. Rather, you’re placed at a voyeuristic vantage point as one of the other invisible guests at this venue, playing a guessing game as to what conversation the three might be having and what is the relationship dynamic between the three. Right at the outset, Song sets up the visual grammar for the film, which is carried through for the entirety of the narrative.

No matter the level of intimacy the characters may share with each other, as the viewer, you’re always kept at an arm’s length, a once-removed level of distance; a fact that is reinforced through the way the film is shot and how it progresses. How you sit with this uncomfortableness – of never being fully let into these characters’ lives and inner thoughts – especially when the film is preoccupied with the closeness and intimacy we share with people over time – will have a major impact on how you feel about the film once you walk out of the theatre. 

Song is comfortable with this tension. This is evident through the second major takeaway from the initial scene. The scene sets up this ambiguity about the exact nature and relationship dynamic between our three major protagonists – is it a love triangle? Who loves whom if that’s the case? How are these three characters related, and when did their paths cross? Song quietly unravels these threads for us as the film goes on.

However, the answers she provides may not necessarily help resolve the ambiguity in people’s minds, more so if you approach the film from a heteronormative lens, that is, having heteronormative views on romance, desire, attraction, and the nature of relationships. The film plays with the idea of how desire, yearning, and longing manifest: sometimes as romantic inclinations, while at other times, these may be purely platonic. However, the nature of this manifestation has no correlation to how intensely this desire can manifest.

Just because you have a romantic inclination toward someone doesn’t necessarily imply that it has to be stronger than your platonic love for someone else. I will return to how this film veers into queer territory later on in the review. Still, I wanted to introduce the idea at first and acknowledge how the film completely throws heteronormative concepts out of the window regarding how people connect with each other right from the very beginning.

While on one hand, Past Lives is an intimate drama about connection, longing, and how different forms of love can co-exist without one taking preference over another, it is also a film about migration and the sense of displacement first-generation migrants can feel as they are uprooted from their home country and look to find their footing in their new ‘home.’ In fact, for me, for the most part, the stronger and more evocative sections of the film revolved around the migrant story and the feeling of displacement – of the many ‘past lives’ that you leave unlived and half-experienced when you move to a new country and have to start afresh.

One of these ‘unfinished’ lives is about 12-year-old Na Young and her school friend Hae Sung in South Korea. Both of them are inseparable, with Na Young even admitting to her mother that she likes Hae Sung. However, life has other plans, and Na Young’s family soon migrates to Toronto, dramatically changing the course of whatever life Na Young and Hae Sung would’ve imagined until then: the milestones they would never reach as young adults together, the future they imagined was, almost instantly, reimagined. 

We jump 12 years ahead. Na Young has now become ‘Nora’ (played by Greta Lee) and is trying to make a career as a young writer. On a whim, Nora starts to reminisce about her life back in Korea as a young child, where her friends from school might be today, and what they might be up to. This includes Hae Jung, and after a span of 12 years – as happenstance tore them apart, happenstance reconnects them once again – they speak to each other, albeit virtually, via Skype. Hae Jung (the adult version played by Teo Yoo) still prefers to call Nora by her Korean name Na Young. 

I found this section of the film to be strangely intimate. While a virtual screen separates the characters, and they are thousands of miles apart, it’s the only part of the film where as a viewer, you don’t feel removed from the characters and what they are feeling. For once, you are invited into their intimate surroundings as the connection between Nora and Hae Sung deepens and becomes stronger.

The sense of time here is also deliberately played with. After jumping forward 12 years in time, suddenly, time slows down in this section of the film – each Skype call, each moment that these two are able to share virtually, feels like an eternity. This deliberate playfulness with the idea of time is a structural conceit that can sometimes make it difficult to fully immerse yourself in the film.  

I can sense why Song made this deliberate choice. The whiplash and disorientation you feel as a viewer – not being able to follow the rhythm and sense of time – in certain moments, the film jumps forward across years, while in other segments, time seems to have stopped still – seemingly attempts to recreate the feeling of disorientation that is common to the migration experience, especially for first-generation migrants.

That feeling of never quite feeling settled in your new home country – that feeling of restlessness and unease is what Song attempts to recreate through the film’s structure and visual grammar. The fact that we, as viewers, are continuously second-guessing the idea of time and trying to gauge how much time has passed for these characters, it’s part of recreating the migrant experience of never feeling settled in one place. 

The developing and deepening intimacy through virtual screens between Nora and Hae Sung is abruptly cut short. And we jump forward in time once again by 12 years. By this point, Nora is in a relationship with a fellow writer, Arthur (John Magaro), and they’ve settled into their own version of domestic bliss in New York City. We find out that Hae Sung is coming to visit and has made contact with Nora with an offer to see each other in person for the first time in 24 years. 

Past Lives is a film that relishes the question of ‘what if’ – throwing two individuals who don’t actually share much of their lives together, and yet, fate keeps reuniting them again and again at different stages of their lives. The film develops this idea through the Korean concept of ‘In-Yun,’ the fated connection between two people who are destined to meet or cross paths. As Nora herself explains in the film, “It’s an In-Yun if two strangers even walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush. Because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8000 layers of In-Yun over 8000 lifetimes.” 

The cinematic language in these segments closely resembles another filmmaker who loved returning to themes of fated meetings and unfinished stories: Wong Kar Wai. The heavy use of voice-over laid on top of montage-style footage steeped in nostalgia are stylistic hallmarks borrowed from Wong Kar Wai, which show up here in Past Lives. I could just easily imagine a monologue from a Wong Kar Wai protagonist instead of Nora talking about ‘In-Yun’ in these moments of the film – “the past is something he could see, but not touch…”

Now, let’s return to the question of the nature of the relationship between Nora and Hae Sung. The heteronormative gaze forces one to define exactly what that might be. Song’s response to this concrete ‘exactness’ is interesting. The film refuses to privilege the relationship between Nora and Arthur (one that supposedly fits within the conventional, heteronormative gaze) over the connection between Nora and Hae Sung (which is intense and deeply felt, though it remains largely undefined). The film places both these connections on an equal pedestal, refusing to tilt in favor of one over another. 

Song is also perceptive enough not to allow Nora’s intense connection with Hae Sung to veer into sexual territory. The film allows two very different forms of love to co-exist independently of each other – sexual attraction, intimacy, and romantic love on one hand and intensely felt platonic love on the other (which might or might not give way to potential romantic feelings but largely remains aromantic).

As an asexual person, it was surprising, yet incredibly affirming, to see that a heteronormative relationship was not privileged over a mostly platonic one and the kind of love those characters share. Even better is that the connection between Nora and Hae Sung was never ‘downplayed’ as a friendship. For all the film’s ambiguity, it is obvious that the connection Nora and Hae Sung share is much more than just a friendship, even if it doesn’t go into sexual or deeply romantic territory. 

The use of ‘In-Yun’ as a connective tissue also supports a queer reading of the film and the possible hinting toward a queerplatonic relationship (QPR) between Nora and Hae Sung if circumstances were different. In the introduction to “Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity,” José Esteban Muñoz writes, “Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing… Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”

Song evokes ‘In-Yun’ as a device to leave us with the possibility of Nora and Hae Sung being together, in their own way, in another world, in a different future life.

The film’s final segment sets up the much-anticipated meeting between Nora and Hae Sung – the moment the film has been building towards since the beginning – in a decidedly understated manner. Here, once again, Song subverts your expectations. Along with cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, New York City is captured completely new and refreshingly, giving it new life on the screen as an intimate city where two people can spend quiet moments together and breathe in silences.

When experiencing the final stretch of this film, I was reminded of ’96 (2018), the understated yet deeply nostalgic Indian Tamil-language romantic drama by C. Premkumar. The film is a terrific two-hander, led by pitch-perfect performances by Vijay Sethupathi and Trisha Krishnan as two high school sweethearts who meet again in different circumstances at their high school reunion after a gap of several years. After such a long time, the chance meeting becomes a catalyst for both of them to get much-needed closure and – for Vijay Sethupathi’s Ram – finally accept his fate and move on in life.  

The long-awaited reunion for Nora and Hae Sung is also an act of closure for both – to recognize that they’re no longer who they were when they were 12 years old in Korea; that despite fate bringing them together again and again, their lives and experiences have been very different. It’s a moment of closure our characters have been waiting for, and still, when it arrives, much like everything else in the film, the impact is reserved, mellow, and extremely understated. There isn’t that big, cathartic moment of emotional release that you expect.

 Perhaps, in another life, there might be a different end to this story. 

 Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

Past Lives screened at the Sydney Film Festival and will be theatrically released in India from 07 July 2023.

Past Lives Links: IMDb, Sydney Film Festival, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia
Writer-Director: Celine Song
Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro
Cinematographer: Shabier Kirchner
Editor: Keith Fraase
Language: In English and Korean
Genre: Romance, Drama
Runtime: 105 minutes

Where to watch Past Lives