Your breath will be taken away by a scene in the new film Past Lives by Celine Song. One of the greatest films of the year, the delicate semi-romantic drama centres on Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who first met as childhood loves in South Korea and are split apart when Nora immigrates to Canada at the age of 12. After Nora has gone to New York and married a fellow writer, Past Lives checks up on them every 12 years. This includes an online reunion and an in-person reunion. Song abruptly and wordlessly shifts to a different historical period with a visceral emotional clarity towards the end of the film, under circumstances we won’t divulge here, in a way that could cause viewers to cry in torrents.
Months after seeing the movie, we still have to force ourselves to maintain our composure as we question Song, the writer-director of the picture, about whether that particular scene was always written into the script (it was), and how it manages to have the exact effect it does (Song gives the credit for the logistics to her production designer Grace Yun and cinematographer Shabier Kirchner). The song can talk about the production’s technical components, but she gladly delves into the quiet force of her picture, which at moments approaches science fiction in the way it travels across time with a cosmic yet accessible sense of inevitability.
As we sit across from one another in the New York library of renowned independent studio A24 (Midsommar, Everything Everywhere All At Once), she continues, “The physics of time and space are unchangeable. We are surrounded by shelves of DVDs and Blu-rays that neatly condense A24’s ten-year history of box office triumph in chronological release-date order. We both geek out over this sorting system when she first enters the room. We have to go through space and time at the same rate as everyone else, Song says. “But sometimes, just by being able to imagine someone you knew as a child, you can exist outside, underneath, or above it.”
She speaks, maintaining steady eye contact that we rapidly learn to recognise as her signature: “I didn’t know you when you were 12, but if you’re talking to somebody who [did], and I asked that person, ‘can you believe it, he used to be 12?’ – immediately you know that person could be immediately transported to that time, and they’d be able to see you as a 12-year-old. That’s the amazing power we all have, to see another part of a person’s story in a different time or space.”
Many individuals will get shivers when viewing Past Lives. The UK will have to wait until September 7 to see it, but in the US it has evolved into a lasting arthouse version of a summer hit. With 14 weekends and counting at the iconic Angelika theatre in the West Village, across the street from where Song used to live, it recently surpassed the Spider-Man animated film Across The Spider-Verse to become the current theatrical engagement with the longest run in New York City.
Similar like Nora in the movie, Song was born in South Korea, relocated to Canada when she was 12, and eventually ended up in New York City where she studied for her doctorate degree and subsequently found work as a writer. Her father is a filmmaker, while her mother is an illustrator and graphic designer. She applied to both film and theatre programmes before opting to study playwriting at Columbia. In other words, she was already in the film industry as a movie enthusiast growing up in suburban Toronto; her love of theatre did not drive her there.
One of Past Lives’ most amazing qualities is how it seems connected to the reality of our digital age without lamenting or celebrating our connectedness in the 21st century. Technology alters the details of Nora and Hae Sung’s connection (or occasionally its absence), but its fundamentals stay unchanged. It thus comes as no surprise that Song has always had a keen interest in digital media. She was asked to create an online performance by the New Theatre Workshop in the early stages of the COVID-19 epidemic.
