Past Lives
Following a seemingly endless wait, Celine Song’s Past Lives has finally released in UK and Irish cinemas. Exploring the ordinariness of modern love, Song’s deep yet gentle romantic drama examines how our lives can be governed by fate. Central to the picture’s narrative is inyun - the Korean concept of providence in human relations built up over past lives. With on screen romance often operating at the mercy of chance, has something akin to inyun been working its magic on film audiences for decades?
Big Screen romantic drama has long been hooked on sweeping tales of kismet, littered with intangible meet cutes and obstacles to love. In writer/director Celine Song’s refreshingly minimalist debut feature Past Lives, New York based playwright Nora (Greta Lee) is about to meet with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), her closest childhood friend from her native Seoul, whose on/off correspondence punctuates the film’s time jumps. Through a series of pivotal moments, Song has us rooting for two friends to get together who haven’t been on the same continent in more than 20 years.
Sharing Nora’s life is her American husband Arthur (John Magaro). On their initial meeting at a retreat for writers, Nora explains to Arthur the levels of inyun at play in human relationships - from the brush of two people in a crowd to the layers that must occur over 8,000 lifetimes to result in two people getting married. Stemming from a Buddhist concept centred around reincarnation, Nora tells Arthur that inyun in its modern form is ‘…just something Koreans say…to seduce someone.’ Whilst Nora’s sense of inyun is a catalyst to exploration, we later learn Hae Sung holds onto his like a mantra.
Nora and Arthur’s relationship is one of pragmatism: they love one another, there is little left unsaid, they have had time to develop together over their 12-year relationship. We see the everyday of their lives and even their first meeting at the retreat is grounded, no nonsense, contrasted to a bucolic setting, strewn with soft outdoor lights and slowed by alcohol. Nora’s relationship with Hae Sung however, is all possibility, it isn’t pinned by making ends meet, it is pure conjecture. A grown up yet childlike fantasy that lives where their union does - in another country, another time, another life.
In the most intimate moment in Song’s picture, Nora and Arthur discuss the convenience of their early relationship from living together because they were both in New York to marrying so Nora could obtain a green card. In the couple’s dimly lit bedroom, they discuss Nora’s dreaming in a different language whilst Arthur worries he may be an obstacle to her perfect love story with Hae Sung. Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner (whose exquisite photography brought Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series to life) keeps the camera stock still, fixing our gaze, making us look at this moment.
Romance in Drama
Movies can help us make sense of the world, playing out to a usually finite ending, be it certain or ambiguous. The closing scene of Past Lives is both. Nora cries as she returns to her apartment and life with Arthur after Hae Sung leaves. Has Nora severed the final link with her childhood ? Or has she closed the door on true love, with her and Hae Sung’s communications across decades acting as their past lives? Are Nora and Arthur’s easy interactions the result of thousands of layers of inyun? There is an ache in this picture, a sense of longing that stays with you for days after watching it.
Praise for Past Lives has been widespread with many critics placing Song’s picture on the same plane as Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, hitting similar beats to those of writer/directors Greta Gerwig, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi or Aftersun creator Charlotte Wells. There are hints of Mike Leigh’s decorated domesticity too, his characters often yearning for some other truth outside of their everyday lives. Whilst a seemingly disparate group of filmmakers to be thrown in with, their interpretations of love transcend the commonplace, crafting something truly cinematic in the process.
With only a short time to tell a story, film does so through economy. In the case of romance, a situation can be expedited to the point of contrivance to ensure an audience’s investment. Whether through kismet, chance, serendipity, fate or inyun, and no matter how unlikely, we must believe in the union on screen to buy in. Whilst films with a key romantic focus often hit the ground running by establishing a romantic need on the part of its protagonists, a film with romance as a secondary facet can sometimes hit us from left field, rendering the emotional wallop all the more powerful.
The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful
Romance can live and die anywhere in the movies, even between characters on opposite sides of the law. Norman Jewison’s stylish caper The Thomas Crown Affair (1969) pits the titular thief (Steve McQueen) against whip smart insurance agent Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway). Drenched in old school Hollywood chemistry, the audience cheers on these warring lovers brought together by their chosen professions, willing them to walk off into the sunset together in Theadora Van Runkle’s fine costuming. Yet the two end the picture apart, in a finale as gripping as it is cruel.
A similar relationship forms between U.S. Marshall Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) and inveterate bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) in Steven Soderbergh’s film version of Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight (1998). Escaping from prison, Foley bundles Sisco into the boot of her own car and they converse about fate, circumstance and movies, lit only by the glow of red taillights and set to David Holmes’s stylised, 70s influenced score. Lopez and Clooney’s magnetism is so subtly electrifying that the audience continually roots for them, even when Cisco ultimately returns Foley to prison.
Just a few months earlier, Quentin Tarantino filmed Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch as Jackie Brown (1998). Facing prison on smuggling charges, flight attendant Jackie (Pam Grier) sees one last chance to get out from under with the help of bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster). Blaxploitation legend Grier and the all but forgotten Forster are never better than as these middle-aged outsiders thrown together by circumstance. Ultimately, Max turns down Jackie’s offer to leave together and the camera stays on him as we witness an internal collapse, realising his one chance at love is gone.
Time is Essential
Romantic leads often meet when there is an obstacle in the way of their union, but what if that hurdle is insurmountable? In Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2010), an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel, George Falconer (Colin Firth) mourns the death of his lover Jim (Matthew Goode). The grave is seemingly the obstacle, but also the social mores of the time would have looked negatively on the gay couple’s relationship. Ford’s impossibly beautiful picture wrestles with love, life and death, gently suffusing its frames with the warm afterglow of the Southern California sun.
Set a decade earlier, Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015) sees well-heeled Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) begin an intense relationship with photographer Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), amidst the red/green of an American Christmas. Carol and Therese’s connection is evident from their first chance meeting, yet they must hide their love, considered unnacceptable at the time. Carol is based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt. Published under a pseudonym to protect Highsmith’s profile at the time, the book was groundbreaking for being a lesbian story with a happy ending.
Time eventually destroys journalist Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and secretary Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) in Wong Kar-wai’s lyrical masterpiece In the Mood for Love (2000), as the two develop feelings for one another following the realisation their spouses are having an affair. Set in 1960s Hong Kong, Wong throws every obstacle at the would be lovers from social acceptability to physical distance, all catalysed by their own crushing reticence. Michael Galasso’s peerless score layered with Christopher Doyle’s lush cinematography render the two’s near misses all the more heartbreaking.
Love in the Margins
Whether a blip in the chaos of the universe or ordained by infinite layers of providence, these destined occurrences can go on to define a character’s world and even destroy it. Melina Matsoukas explores the devastating collision of chance and race in the Lena Waithe penned Queen and Slim (2020). Following a mediocre date, stylish defence lawyer Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) and casual store worker Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) shoot a white police officer in self defence. A fraught but electrifying road trip ensues, leading to proclamations of love followed by the couple being gunned down.
At the centre of Barry Jenkins’s drama Moonlight (2017) is a much longer gestating romance. A fleeting sexual encounter between teenage friends Chiron and Kevin is followed quickly by a forced act of violence which alters the course of Chiron’s life. A decade later, Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) and Kevin (André Holland) meet and talk openly of the effect they have had on one another. Enveloped in James Laxton’s gorgeously saturated photography and Nicholas Brittell’s fragile score, Jenkins creates a film filled with the consequences and disappointments of love’s promise.
Set in late 18th century Brittany, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2020) depicts the brief, intense affair between hired portrait painter Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and her reluctant subject, the soon to be married Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Their sexual relationship burns brightly for such a short period but their love and care for one another transcend the time they have together. The couple’s fateful separation is repeatedly felt as a hammer blow through Marianne’s later life recollections alongside the portrait itself which sits in agonising, simmering posterity.
Narratively, things often need to fit together to make a picture truly sing yet is it conscious notions such as providence or chance or inyun that allow us to be carried along by these stories? How complicit is the viewer in what they are seeing unfold? Each audience member brings their own perspective to every film, to every viewing, and that’s really what gives these pictures their place in the cultural landscape. Film can inspire, educate, or alarm, yet its primary function is arguably to entertain and what’s more entertainingly human than witnessing people falling in love.
Past Lives released in UK and Irish cinemas on 7 September through Studiocanal.
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