Flasz On Film

Conventional storytelling conditions us to look for story arcs in films we watch. We gravitate to plot. To how external stimuli shape the characters we follow. To how words become actions and how actions bestow meaning onto the stories we are told. We find comfort in prose. Prose speaks to our minds. 

Conversely, we might feel alienated by poetry if prose is where we are at home because for a poet, words are not actions. They are emotions. They are capsules of meaning strung together not so much to tell us a story but to make us feel something the poet felt. Poetry speaks to our hearts.  

And every now and then you will find a film that finds an overlap between these two seemingly disparate worlds – a film which uses the vocabulary of prose, but somehow magically manages to bypass our minds and sneak into our hearts with its emotional payload. Celine Song’s Past Lives is such a unicorn film that looks like prose and plays like prose… but it grabs your heart like a poem.  

This strange curiosum doesn’t just fall out of the sky either. Unless you are John Coetzee or Kazuo Ishiguro, a mere mortal just doesn’t sit down and manufacture something like Past Lives out of thin air and their own imagination. Just a cursory glance at Song’s biography will immediately inform you why her movie hits the way it does, and it is because it is most likely immensely personal to her. This seemingly simple narrative about Nora/Na Young (Greta Lee) and how she comes to rekindle her relationship with a childhood friend Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) more than two decades after moving out of Seoul is quite clearly anchored in real-life experiences that allowed her to write this movie in such a straightforward and honest way. This is the key – write what you know, and you can damn well be sure that what you have gone through will resonate with others.  

And it just so happens that Past Lives stands a perfect chance to resonate with everyone. After all, we have all left someone behind. There is always going to be someone in whose eyes you are “someone who leaves” or “someone who stays.” This is where the magic of this film lies – we willingly watch Past Lives while thinking of those loves we left behind, those friends from our childhood whom we abandoned at a crossroads, whose messages we failed to return, whom we have forgotten because we simply got overwhelmed with getting our own lives on track.  

See, simple stories don’t always have such power to connect with the viewer the way Celine Song did in her debut feature. It truly takes a poet to reach straight into your heart and force you to interact with what looks like a prosaic narrative in a different manner. It is as though an author was somehow able to make you read a novel with a certain rhythm, so as to emphasize some words, take pauses in what look like arbitrary places (which they are most certainly not), and refuse to conform to the idea that what you are supposed to do is follow a story. You are not.  

Song’s film is an experience and experiences just are. It isn’t a snooty arthouse exercise in self-congratulatory apotheosis of artistic elevation only a critic can understand. It is a simple movie about simple people… for simple people like you and me. But it makes you feel special in a way most movies just don’t. It makes you appreciate moments, negative spaces, pregnant pauses and slow zooms Song frequently deploys in pursuit of what I believe is relaying her own life story to you. Only a handful of filmmakers working today can do what Past Lives does with equal ease. Think Sofia Coppola and Kelly Reichardt. Think Charlotte Wells whose Aftersun earlier this year was an equally evocative cinematic experience. Think Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. Think Lulu Wang’s The Farewell.  

And it is not required to also know what it feels like to put you r entire life in a suitcase and move across the globe in search of a new home. It helps, but Song’s movie is way more general than that. It appeals to such fundamental aspects of the human condition that even if you never left the town you grew up in, you will still find it immensely relatable. Because you don’t need to travel to leave someone behind. Or to miss them. Or to try to mend fences. Or to realize how much you may have loved them before you became who you are today. Or to understand that you have become who you are today because you once loved them and because you had to abandon them.  

Past Lives may be a simple film with a very straightforward premise, but I promise you that the emotions you shall experience while watching it, on the way home and even days after will be complex, nuanced and perhaps overwhelming. That’s just because life isn’t simple despite looking as though it was. Nora walks through life seemingly unimpeded just like you, or I. She makes decisions, accomplishes goals, experiences emotions, interacts with others. She doesn’t have adventures. There is no plot to her story. She just exists and Celine Song’s camera captures it with incredible flair and subtlety. We are never asked to worry about what will happen next, even if the fundamentals of the story will suggest asking if she will get back with Hae Sung, or if her husband (John Magaro) feels threatened by the arrival of her wife’s childhood sweetheart. It doesn’t matter and we never feel that it should. You will just watch this film grinning because you will live vicariously through Nora. You will identify with the redemptive feeling of reaching out to someone you’ve once forgotten and experience continual release of dopamine as the film unfolds… until you realize you are in tears. Because Nora is.  

There’s no better way to describe Past Lives than to call it a stirring masterpiece and a true unicorn in modern cinematic terms. It adds to the phenomenal tradition of what I can only define as “poetic prose” and sends you on a journey of self-reflection with nothing more than simple human interactions captured on film with phenomenal honesty. Celine Song is an incredible filmmaker, and her first feature film should be counted as one of the best of the year, as it reminds us about the power of the moving image. It is not here to entertain or to exhilarate. It is here to imitate life and to elevate it in the process. It is a visual poem – frugal, modest and poignant – a collection of images that somehow add up to much more than the images alone. It conjures up real human emotion and connects to us in ways most movies don’t even know is a possibility. And if it makes you pick up the phone and reach out to that person to whom you are “someone who leaves”, who knows? Maybe Past Lives has what it takes to become a film that changes lives. Which would put it on par with Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy.