After Past Lives the ranking of romantic movies needs to be updated. Okay, not in the top ten where the classics stand out, but in the top 30 there is a small place for the film written and directed by Celine Song he finds it safe. A crossroads of destinies and “past lives” between the Koreans Nora/Na Young (Greta Lee) in Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), a rubbing of bodies (the In-Yun which we will explain later) reverberated over time (the protagonists at 12, at 24, finally at 36) and space (SeoulSkype chat, New York). With a small structural variation on the downbeat: in a New York bar in the present day, two off-screen voices observe a Korean woman in front of them between two men – one Asian, the other Caucasian (Arthur/John Magaro) – and they wonder what they are saying to each other and what roles they have for each other.
It is the beginning of the film which is basically a long exploratory sentimental flashback on the three protagonists. Twelve-year-olds Na Young and Hae Sung are always instinctively together on the streets of Seoul, but she leaves with her family for Canada following his director father. Twelve years later Na Young has become the American Nora, an established writer and screenwriter in the East Village of New York, and discovers that Hae is looking for her on social media: the two begin a heartfelt chat via Skype that lasts weeks until It is Hae who decides not to leave for the United States. Another twelve years pass. Nora is married to Arthur, a writer of the same age who is a bit naïve like her, but this time Hae arrives shy and hesitant with the trolley for real in the Big Apple. We will have to definitively do the math and understand what this silent and never dormant feeling between the two Korean boys is made of.
Past Lives it is a love triangle to be reconstructed and shown in its never predictable complexity of souls, but without sex and carnality, more butterflies flying in the stomach than thrills at the bottom of the belly. A chaste film, played on an incalculable quantity of intense glances and eye trajectories, but without ever focusing on close-ups or very close-ups. There is so much air that Song’s camera leaves above the protagonists’ heads, flooding them with ambient sounds and, sequence after sequence, placing Nora before the center of the triangle (the initial dolly in the bar towards her face already said All).
A shamelessly and brilliantly feminine film, therefore, because it is in Nora’s dazed and magmatic sensitivity, in her fluctuating effective perception of the turmoil of the heart that the whole story finally settles down: she goes away, she opens, she closes, she suffers, she shuffles the cards (the scene of the bar is very painful only for the two men), she chooses how everything will end. After all, more than the eternal idea of sliding doors in Past Lives the interpretative paradigm of the recurring meeting is in the Korean spiritual assumption of In-yun: in any place and time you have met someone who you will meet again (even 8000 rubbings for 8000 lives, it is said in the film). A bewitching assumption, played with a gentle balance between magic and reality on a narrative level, and also autobiographical for the director who says she really experienced what she says in her debut film. Finally, a gender notation: Past Lives it is in its own way a masterful synthesis of the natural sentimental complexity of the female universe flanked by the increasingly crude, coarse, however sincere, when it exists, exhibition of male affectivity. Two nominations for the 2024 Oscars – director and original screenplay -: it’s a shame there isn’t one for Greta Lee.