It isn't even past

Past Lives is romance between the lines

[I am, you might say, pre-gaming the Oscars, for which the nominations have yet to be announced. You can also see my essays on contenders like Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers, May December, and Poor Things. Much more to come! ]  

Past Lives, broadly about a Korean expatriate woman married to an American man and a visit she receives from her childhood sweetheart, is a quiet movie — even the scenes you might expect to be noisy, like slices of New York street life or packed soju joints in Seoul, seem purposefully dampened and have more hum than clatter. It’s a movie of deep rather than high feelings — there are no blow-ups or dramatic confrontations, though sometimes we can discern in the subtext excitement, anxiety, and even heartbreak.

Many of you will have already decided it’s not your thing. It’s not mine either, really, but it drew me in. I found myself paying very close attention to what was going on with the characters. You might say it’s the prestige drama equivalent of being on the edge of one’s seat. It was worth the effort and, given what even good movies are like these days, a blessed relief.

Nora and her husband are writers in the Breadloaf-workshop churn and live in the East Village. (It’s a tribute to the film’s charm that I didn’t turn it off immediately upon learning this.) Nora’s parents, we learn in flashbacks, are artists who emigrated from Seoul when Nora and her sister were children. (The kids get to pick their new American names; Na Young likes “Nora Moon.”) It’s never spelled out what made the parents do this, but at one point we see their mother telling another child’s mother, “If you leave something behind, you gain something too.” This sentiment gets repeated in various forms throughout the movie.

These mothers are talking as they chaperone their kids on a pre-teen date. Na Young and Hae Sung have been friends for some time, and we get the impression that their date, in which they run around a public park playing with the statuary, is just a heightened version of their usual enjoyment of each other.

But Hae Sung doesn’t know Na Young is leaving. Na Young knows but seems not to grasp the meaning of it; she says she’s probably going to marry Hae Sung even as the mother is arranging their passports.

The mother doesn’t challenge her; she seems to know Na Young is too headstrong to be dissuaded even from impossibilities. The girl also expects moving to America will help her win the Nobel Prize for Literature, as she tells her classmates. Hae Sung, who doesn’t have the same confidence in the power of his own will, is visibly sad to learn that she’s going and hurt that she doesn’t seem upset about it — certainly not as upset as the one time he beat her on school test scores.

He may even think that’s why she’s not so sorry to leave. I’m not sure about that, but it’s the kind of thing that can occur to you as the movie goes quietly about its business.

There is a middle section in which both Nora and Hae Sung are young adults and connect fancifully via Facebook and video chat. Nora has adjusted her aim to the Pulitzer Prize; Hae Sung is studying engineering and plans to go to China to learn Mandarin. Thereafter they video chat frequently. Nora wants him to come to New York. Hae Sung would like her to visit him in Seoul. As I said, the movie is quiet, so though there it is no unusual force in it when Nora says they should stop talking to each other “for a while,” there is a definite effect; and though Hae Sung’s crying is very restrained, it’s terrible.

Shortly thereafter Nora goes to a writer’s residency and makes a play for Arthur, a nice but slightly nebbishy writer — the sort of fellow she can bully if she’s judicious about it. She tells him about the Korean idea of fate, In-Yun, which she says is seen “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.” Eventually she tells him “that’s just something Koreans say to seduce someone.” But this is a tactic rather than an admission.

Eventually everyone’s a little older, Nora wants to win a Tony, Hae Sung has an “ordinary” but serviceable job and he’s coming to town for a visit, which might not have put Arthur on alert if Nora weren’t uncharacteristically clumsy about it (“And I feel so not Korean when I’m with him. But also, in some way, more Korean…” “Is he attractive?” “I think so”). She tells Arthur she’s content with their marriage, which under the circumstances is not much comfort.

Alert or not, Arthur gives Nora and Hae Sung space. And they talk. They talk about who they were, and who they are, and they talk about In-Yun. And then there are the last five or six minutes that they will ever spend with one another, in which very little is said, and Nora’s first five or six minutes after that, without him.

I seem to have gone through the whole story, but believe me, I haven’t; so much of it takes place not only between the lines, but between the actions, as the import of what is said and done, or not said and not done, dawns on you. All the acting is at the level needed to make it work — real as life, clear as water. And if I imagined Greta Lee and Teo Yoo really were who Moon Seung-ah and Leem Seung-min grew up to be, it’s partly their skill and mostly Celine Song, who wrote and directed it as it were a very old and familiar story, which in a way it is.