Celine Song’s Past Lives is a subtle, beautiful, and wise film—one of the year’s best. It’s also a refreshing film in its celebration of moral restraint, self-denial, and sticking with commitments in a world where the opposite is often encouraged, or at least deemed more “authentic.”
It’s a very un-Hollywood love story, upending the predictable script (“Follow your heart”) that has long dominated romantic narratives.
3 Connections over 24 Years
The film follows a woman, Nora (Greta Lee) who spent her childhood in Seoul but emigrated with her family to North America when she was 12. It unfolds in three acts, in three time periods of Nora’s life. The first takes place in her final days of living in Korea. Nora (at that time named Na Young) is best friends with a boy classmate, Hae Sung, and the two appear on the cusp of romance. But it’s not meant to be, seemingly, when Nora’s family leaves Korea and the childhood pals take opposite paths (captured beautifully in a diverging shot of Nora walking up one set of stairs to the upper right of the frame as Hae Sung walks down a different alleyway in the bottom left of the frame).
Twelve years pass, and Nora is now a 20-something aspiring playwright in New York City. Hae Sung (played as an adult by Teo Yoo) is still in Korea and has recently completed his military service. The two reconnect via Facebook and Skype and a long-distance romance begins to blossom. But just like the imperfect connections that characterize their video calls (this is internet technology circa 2011, after all), the vast distance between them is unavoidable. Wanting to go “all in” on her future in America (and feeling like an intensifying relationship with Hae Sung keeps her focused on her past in Korea), Nora calls it off. The two go their separate ways once again.
Another 12 years pass and Nora is now happily married to a Jewish writer named Arthur (John Magaro). Meanwhile, Hae Sung is living in Seoul. But when he comes to visit New York City for the first time, and sees Nora for the first time in person in 24 years, forgotten feelings between the two are suddenly remembered. At this point, the typical Hollywood romance would take a predictable turn into a love triangle plot, with Nora torn between the American man she married and the Korean man who might be her “soul mate.”
But this isn’t the typical Hollywood romance.
‘This Is My Life’
[Spoilers ahead.] Watching Past Lives, I couldn’t help but think of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy (1995’s Before Sunrise, 2004’s Before Sunset, and 2013’s Before Midnight). Just as Past Lives checks in on Hae Sung and Nora at three distinct points of their lives, roughly a decade apart, Linklater’s Before films observe Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) in three different places and times, roughly a decade apart.
Both Linklater’s Before trilogy and Song’s Past Lives explore the concept of star-crossed romance and encounters between two people “fate” seems to be bringing together. But where Before indulges the magnetic allure of a “soul mate” (even if it means divorcing the person you married), Past Lives challenges the “soul mate” idea.
“This is my life, and I’m living it with you,” Nora reassures her husband, Arthur, who is naturally a bit unsettled when Hae Sung visits New York. “This is where I ended up,” she adds. “This is where I’m supposed to be.”
Even if Nora’s complex feelings for Hae Sung are genuine, and even if the “what might have been” question crosses her mind, these are abstract, swirling emotions, not the concrete reality of “This is my life. . . . This is where I’m supposed to be.” She takes the reality of her present life and commitments more seriously than the haunting “what ifs” of untaken alternate paths. For her, “where I’m supposed to be” isn’t some ethereal, open-ended possibility. It’s where she is. Yet the spirit of the age says the opposite: keep options open and entertain every possibility. Commitments are in pencil, not ink.
Nora takes the reality of her present life and commitments more seriously than the haunting ‘what ifs’ of untaken alternate paths.
Refreshingly, Nora’s journey resists this spirit of the age. She seems to have heeded the wisdom we hear from her mother, given 24 years earlier: “If you leave something behind, you gain something too.” Nora’s “past life” in Korea was real and still holds a potent pull on her heart. But instead of focusing on the loss of what’s behind, she chooses to be grateful for the “gain” of what she has now. In a way, this tension offers a faint picture of the struggle Christians know well between our “old self” with its familiar comforts and allure and our “new self” in the Spirit, which we desire but often feel to be jarring, uncomfortable, even alien.
The film in no way diminishes the real feelings of regret, pain, and nostalgia that naturally mark a life lived in time. Nora really does wrestle with who Hae Sung was, is, and might be in her life. That’s part of what makes Past Lives so powerful. It takes complex emotions seriously, even as it subjects them to a mature wisdom that isn’t prone to throw away love for the sake of romance. Past Lives reminds us that sometimes the most thrilling, romantic choice is the “boring” one: Stay married. Stay committed. Stay faithful.
‘In-Yun’ and Our Longing for Providence
As much as Past Lives is a tale of love and romance, it’s also a semiautobiographical story about immigration and the “in-between” nature of leaving one place and starting a new life in a different culture, simultaneously feeling connected to and formed by both. For Nora, the tension she feels between Hae Sung and Arthur parallels the tension between her Korean origin and her American future. That the two men in the story are culturally different underscores this pull between two “homes.”
The Korean notion of in-yun (a word with no English equivalent) figures prominently in the film. As Nora explains it to Arthur, in-yun is a Buddhist concept involving reincarnation, and it refers to fated encounters and destined relationships between people: “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 8,000 layers of in-yun over 8,000 lifetimes.”
The film’s title nods to reincarnation and the idea of a multitude of past lives where in-yun might have developed, echoing on through millennia to the point that it informs the connections between Nora, Hae Sung, and Arthur today. A memorable scene takes place with Nora and Hae Sung sitting in front of Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn, the circular movement of which perhaps nods to the Eastern conception of cyclical time, as opposed to the Western understanding of linear time.
Whether or not Nora actually believes in reincarnation and in-yun isn’t clear. The film doesn’t seem particularly mystical, even as it finds beauty and comfort in the thought that something bigger than us (whether in-yun or perhaps divine providence) is at work forging the relationships that shape us. For Christians, we recognize this mystery as the work of a sovereign God who holds all things together (Col. 1:16–17). And while Lives is coming more from a Buddhist worldview than a Christian one, it’s interesting how the film captures the universal human longing for a world that means something—where our lives are situated within a grander “plan” and our relationships are more than just random collisions. We see this human longing everywhere in pop culture, including in the multiverse trend and its pseudospiritual concept of “canon events” and “inevitable intersections.”
Whatever forces may be at work beyond her control, Nora knows she isn’t a passive player in her life. Some things are in her control: namely, the choice to love who she’s committed to love and to embrace the “where I ended up” life she has (however imperfect), rather than the “what could have been” life she doesn’t. In these choices, she offers a rare and refreshing picture of wisdom.
The Gospel Coalition