Slowly and quietly this year, the film Past Lives from Korean-Canadian dramatist and director Celine Song, has been working its discreet magic. Pretty much every new audience member has been turned into a convert, recommending it to a handful more who joined this film’s growing congregation of fans that can hardly describe the spell it has cast over our hearts. This is partly a deeply romantic and sad movie about lost love and missed chances. It’s also a kind of reverie about alternative existences, and what-if life paths. And this is a more urgent question for first- and second-generation immigrant communities in the US. They may well, as they grow into their 30s and 40s, consider the question: what if I had stayed behind? Who even am I?
Greta Lee plays Nora, an elegant young Korean-born woman who has come to New York City and is now a budding literary star. She is married to a white American: Arthur, played by John Magaro, who is himself a promising young novelist. But this is, as the late Princess Diana might have said, a rather crowded marriage – for the most innocent reasons. Before Nora met Arthur she had reconnected via social media with her former childhood sweetheart who is still in the old country: Hae-sung (played in adulthood by Teo Yoo). Their Skype calls had had an urgency, an excitement, perhaps even a passion that neither could quite admit. And for Nora, switching out of English into Korean means an almost physical change.
