2024-01-16 20:58:28
Past Lives is largely autobiographical, according to the admission of its author, Celine Song, born in South Korea, whose family emigrated to Toronto when she was twelve, before she herself moved to New York at twenty , where she became a renowned playwright. The film focuses on the three stages of Nora’s relationship with Hae Sung, first her best friend at school in Korea where they compete for first place, before their relationship is interrupted by the emigration of her family in Toronto, where she becomes Nora (the choice of a Western first name gives rise to a short family scene in the middle of preparations for departure). Through the coincidence of social networks, they meet once more twelve years later, while Nora is preparing to leave for a writers’ residency, while Hae Sung, a future engineer, plans to go learn Mandarin in China. They get to know each other once more via their cell phone screens until Nora “pauses” their relationship which feeds her nostalgia for Seoul while her future as a writer lies in the United States.
Twelve more years later, he decides to see her once more, having put a romantic relationship on hold because he was unable to assume the economic responsibility of a family. Nora lives with her husband Arthur, a Jewish American writer. After a walk together in New York, Nora takes Hae Sung home, and the evening ends in a bar where Arthur listens without understanding their dialogue in Korean. After Hae Sung leaves, Nora bursts into tears in her husband’s arms.
Through the impossible love story of Nora and Hae Sung, Past Lives deals with the heartbreak of exile, the irremediable changes that emigration brings regarding in relation to the culture of origin, all the more sensitive when it comes to two societies as distant as traditional Korean society (Hae Sung lives still with his parents even though he is over thirty years old) and the melting-pot New Yorker. The film is all the stronger because the characters are constantly smiling and never raise their voices. Pain lurks in the background, probably more for him than for her, because he is not in the same cultural dynamic as Nora, a recognized playwright. He speaks of his work as being as arduous as military service (compulsory for all Korean men, which lasts between eighteen months and two years). South Korea is indeed known for its almost unlimited working hours, harassment from the hierarchy and discrimination of all kinds. We gradually understand the cultural gap that separates them. While he does not give up imagining what their lives might have been like if they had not been separated, she tries to make him understand that the little girl he loved no longer exists.
Their last conversation takes place under the gaze of Nora’s husband, who silently notes the strength of the bond that unites them and to which he will never have access, due to lack of speaking Korean. The pain of the impossible reunion between Nora and Hae Sung is coupled with the pain of Arthur becoming aware of what escapes him from Nora, symbolized by the fact that she speaks in Korean in her dreams. The smiling faces of Greta Lee and Teo Yoo give this story intensity, in a sort of antiphrase with the heartbreak they experience. Intensity further increased paradoxically by the almost total absence of physical contact between them, which is also a characteristic of social exchanges in Korea: we greet each other by bowing our heads but we do not shake hands and we kiss even less . As a result, the slightest physical contact takes on a very strong meaning.
Beyond the evocation of cultural differences, the film demonstrates great formal mastery: as proof, the prologue, a shot of the bar where the trio is sitting facing us while we hear voice-overs (probably from other clients who are like spectators inside the fiction) question the links between these three characters, intrigued by the presence of this Asian woman between an Asian man and a “white” man “. The sequence shot ends with a frame on the woman’s smiling face. It is this shot that we find in the conversation scene at the end, where this time the spectators that we are are able to understand the relationships between the three characters that we saw in the prologue, Hae Sung , Nora and Arthur…
Geneviève Sellier is a film historian, www.genre-ecran.net
Past Lives. Nos vies d’avantwritten and directed by Celine Song, starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Margaro.
1705452720
#Lives #impossible #love
