2024-02-12 09:17:03
by Paolo Mereghetti
«Past Lives»: the fragility of feelings in the fascinating story of director Celine Song
Who are the three people we see sitting at a bar in the very first scene of «Past Lives?» We hear two off-screen voices making some guesses: a brother and sister (they have Asian features) and an American friend? Two tourists and a guide? A couple and a lover? The film will prove all these conjectures wrong, but this scene that reveals nothing is essential to get into the spirit of the film. The director Celine Song herself reiterated this to «FilmTv»: «I wanted the public to be invited to enter the story of those three people, to become a sort of “sentimental” detective to understand what is happening» and she built the whole work again to finally answer those initial questions. Assuming it’s possible to do so…
The first leap backwards is 24 years old, in South Korea, when Na Young and Hae Sung are classmates in middle school. Between the two there is tension that manifests itself in the competition for the best grades but behind it lies a sympathy that has not yet found a way to fully express itself, but which chance is about to break because Nora’s parents have decided to leave the their country to move to Canada. The two boys have no words to comment on this separation, but their silence is very eloquent because it cannot hide what they feel taking shape inside them.
Twelve years later, the two meet again via social media. The friendship of the two children has perhaps transformed into something more complex (and complicated to express) also because we discover that the lives of both have changed: Na Young changed her name to Nora Moon (Greta Lee), she moved to New York City and is finding her way as a playwright while Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) has finished his military service and is due to leave for China to perfect his Mandarin. And two new encounters arrive on the path of both of them: Arthur (John Magaro) for Nora, with whom he will fall in love, and an anonymous girl for Hae Sung.
Another twelve years pass and Hae Sung decides to fly to New York and reach Nora, who is married to Arthur: after a few tours around the city we return to the initial scene, with the three sitting at the bar chatting. Naturally the film doesn’t end here but even if we wanted to do some healthy spoilers we wouldn’t know what to reveal. Because the charm and beauty of the film lies precisely in its not wanting to say, in making people understand and not explain, in forcing the spectator to enter the heads (and hearts) of the two protagonists. If not even to look within oneself for the pieces of the puzzle that seem to be missing.
«Past Lives» is a film you don’t expect, eccentric and surprising because it overturns the rules we are used to finding in films. He directly calls the spectator into question not to take some position in favor of this or that but to push him to deal with delicacy, with fragility and impalpability, with feelings “in their nascent state”, as he perhaps would have said Alberoni. The film talks about in-yun, something that is halfway between providence and destiny and that unites people, and perhaps this is precisely the theme that the film asks us to deal with, with that indistinct but concrete sensation of feel something that binds us in some way to a person. Without understanding how far that “bond” can go.
What does Nora look for when faced with Hae Sung? Do you want to recover her roots with her land and her past? Or rediscover the candor of a childhood love that has faded over the years? And what is Hae Sung hoping for with that belated trip to New York? Will the purchase of a plane ticket be enough for you to make explicit what you have never had the courage to say over the years? The strength and beauty of the film lies precisely in this uncertainty, in this enigmatic nature, in the feelings in which the two protagonists seem to lose themselves and find each other again (with Arthur as the third wheel) and which ask the spectator not so much for a comparison but for a reflection: what is Is it really love?
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February 11, 2024 (modified February 12, 2024 | 10:16)
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