PAST LIVES, and the power of a story of "destined" true love
A personal perspective on what the best movie of 2023 is *really* about
Note: The following includes some spoilers for Celine Song’s Past Lives; proceed at your own risk.
Spring, 1994, Northern California. Several months removed from a breakup, and somewhat recently indoctrinated into the world of “the Internet,” I placed a personal ad on what was then simply a Usenet newsgroup; websites and apps for that purpose were still years away. I put it out into the world, expecting little to nothing in the way of results, and waited. Not shockingly, for a few days, nothing happened.
The first scene in Celine Song’s Past Lives doesn’t belong to the three main characters, at least not directly. We see them—Nora (Greta Lee), Hae-sung (Teo Yoo) and Arthur (John Magaro)—sitting at a bar, but we’re seeing through the eyes of a pair of other bar patrons, engaging in that familiar game of trying to figure out what’s going on with strangers they pick out in a public place. These unseen others observe body language and try to make sense of what they’re watching, some of those conclusions based on the respective races of the three people. As the scene concludes, Nora looks directly into the camera, at the narrators, at us, as if to acknowledge being part of someone else’s interpretation of her story. We can’t help it. We’re human. We make meaning through stories.
An email arrived from someone who had seen my personal ad—a graduate student at the University of North Carolina. She wasn’t responding to it out of interest per se, but as a kindness, to suggest that I seemed like a nice enough guy, and to wish me luck. But some of her references to my ad didn’t quite make sense; she was referring to descriptions of myself that I hadn’t used. After a few exchanges, it became clear that she had *seen* my ad, but was actually responding (accidentally) to someone else’s. She hadn’t really meant to write to me at all. We chuckled about it (virtually), then continued to exchange a few messages.
That story of Nora’s that we see unfold in flashback reveals Nora and Hae-sung as childhood friends in South Korea, harboring a mutual-if-unspoken crush just as Nora’s family is planning to emigrate to Canada. Years later, they find one another online, and begin a video-chat-based friendship/flirtation that seems on the verge of turning into a full-fledged relationship, before Nora cuts it off as impractical and distracting to her plans of becoming a playwright. Not long after, Nora meets aspiring novelist Arthur while they’re both attending a writers’ retreat, and they ultimately get together and marry. Their relationship seems happy and stable enough—and then, several more years later, Hae-sung decides to visit New York for the first time, presenting the opportunity for Nora and Hae-sung to be physically together for the first time in decades.
Some weeks of near-daily email exchanges go by; eventually, she asks about exchanging phone numbers. Emails turn into phone calls; phone calls turn into a plan for her to travel across country for us to meet in person for a couple of days. A whirlwind weekend ends with a kiss, and confusion as to what comes next. There are complications that need resolving. We plan another opportunity for her to fly out. And when we are once again together, we realize that we have fallen in love.
It’s fundamental to Song’s tale that both Nora and Arthur are writers, that they are both storytellers, and that they understand how powerful narrative can be in framing how we view the world. In one scene, they talk about that very subject while in bed together—the difference between the romantic ideas that would be attached to Nora and Hae-sung eventually finding one another, compared to the relatively mundane circumstances of their own meeting. And as Song captures Nora and Hae-sung interacting, she draws the components of their backstory into the foreground, like a scene in which they have “a moment” while seated in front of a carousel, placing them in the framework of childhood innocence. If—if—they were to find themselves coming together romantically, it would be the kind of ending people root for. It would be an ending tied to the notion of fate that permeates the narrative of Past Lives right down to its title, which evokes a Korean notion about souls being destined to connect with one another based on their connection over other lifetimes. People love a good “how did you two get together” story, especially one that suggests the people in question were meant to get together.
She took a semester off from school to relocate and spend a sustained amount of time together, to really see if the relationship felt right. It did. She ultimately graduated and moved to California in 1995. In 1996, we got married.
Past Lives has been described by many intelligent people as a story about regret and missed opportunity, yet it doesn’t feel to me as though that’s the story Song is telling. Those who read the ending as tragic aren’t necessarily thinking about it in the fullest sense; it’s not so much that Nora and Hae-sung should have been together, but that our sense of what a “love story” is tells us that they should have been together—even if Nora’s relationship with Arthur is without serious flaws. Nora the creative artist has fully ingested the notion that great loves involve great stories. She feels something missing in a love, however real, that lacks that kind of story. Those stories give us a sense of confidence that yes, of course, this pairing could not have been otherwise. The tragedy of Past Lives isn’t necessarily that Nora and Hae-sung should have found their way into one another’s arms; it’s that Nora will never be able to stop wondering if that’s the way her story was “meant” to end.
She and I raised two children and are still happily together, nearly 30 years after the email equivalent of a wrong number.