There’s a section in Past Lives, Celine Song’s gorgeous, deft debut film about a pair of reconnecting childhood sweethearts, that immediately portaled me to the year 2011.
It was not the fashion, which is vaguely of a time past, nor a character’s old iPhone interface, nor the math provided for the film’s flashbacks, but the particular doo-do-doo of a Skype ringtone on an open laptop, that ersatz sonar of long-distance connection. Nora Moon (Greta Lee, a fascinating mix of sharp and soft) is an aspiring playwright in her early 20s in New York City, and has engaged in a very familiar late 2000s game: searching the names of old connections on Facebook to see what they’re up to now. Who’s successful? Who turned out hot? What traces remain of the person you once knew?
Hae Sung, the boy Nora had a crush on as a child – the one she liked and trusted enough to admit to her mother, in the days before her family immigrated from Seoul to Canada, that she might marry him – grew up to be handsome. (He’s played as an adult by South Korean star Teo Yoo, who is somehow just as convincing as a 23-year-old as he is in his late 30s). And he thought about her, too. In another period-right detail, Nora discovers a Facebook comment by Hae Sung on a post about her father: back in Seoul, out of the military, he wondered what happened to his old friend. She reaches out on Facebook; they pivot to Skype.
Since its debut at Sundance in January, Past Lives has accrued slow-rolling, deserved hype – as the year’s first great movie, as an achingly effective love story, as a rare emotionally mature adult film somewhere between the romantic and the platonic. (I’ll add that, secondary to the delicate narrative, Song’s depiction of New York is the most lived-in, tangible and vibrant, that I’ve seen in ages.) Many have focused, not wrongly, on Song’s delicate rendering of both reconnection – the tender bond that comes from having known someone, in presence and absence, for almost as long as you’ve known yourself – and of marriage. By the time Hae Sung visits New York in the present, well into their 30s, Nora is in a long-term, supportive, emotionally communicative relationship with Arthur (an excellent John Magaro), a fellow writer.
But it’s that Skype interlude that, for me, captures the film’s quiet power: its mature, acute understanding of inexpressible feelings and undefinable relationships, ones fostered by the passage of time and the presence of screens. Back in 2011, freshly in touch in their early 20s, Hae Sung and Nora are stunned by the image of their screens: the face of a sweet spot and a question, beamed across the present and haloed by the laptop glow. They’re both nervous, tentative. And then they fall into a new, intoxicating rhythm: rushing home to open the laptop, fumbling for the right angle on the webcam, curling into the languorous comfort of a long, ambling call. They talk about their days, their futures, their jokes, their old friendship. They miss calls and are distracted and have their offline lives warped by the weird, magnetic pulse of their long-distance, siloed correspondence.
In a succinct, evocative sequence, Song conveys the cherished accumulation of their calls and messages, which recalled for me the many, many hours I used to spend on Skype – whole nights, like Nora’s first call with Hae Sung, bingeing on digital conversation as if it was some novelty candy, with lovers and with friends, sometimes a mix in between. Talking online for two to six hours at a time, or with any regular rhythm tacitly understood by only two people, can have that muddling effect. The glitchy blur on the screen is a patina of tangible presence, but it’s deeply intimate all the same. Nora gets confused, too. Her relationship with Hae Sung is not explicitly romantic, but too charged to be just friends. It’s full of palpable, unspoken longing. When she cuts it off, knowing it will be at least a year before either can actually visit the other, it’s viscerally devastating, all the more so as an end to something that was never officially started in the first place.
Past Lives captures, better than most films I’ve seen, this mundane, modern yearning – the kind greased by photos and relationship updates online, of paths not taken and intimacy lost, that doesn’t so much rupture our lives as fold into the everyday. Hae Sung’s visit to New York reactivates Nora’s wistful streak but, to the film’s credit, does not veer into the overly sentimental or melodramatic. “What a good story this is,” Arthur muses in bed. “Childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later and realize they were meant for each other.” She laughs, warmly, and tells him to shut up.
That the alternate course in Past Lives is overlaid with diasporic longing – Hae Sung is not only a childhood friend and crush, but a vision of Nora’s life had her family stayed in Korea – heightens the stakes of their reunion but does not blunt the specificity. It’s rare to see a film so accurately capture the type of unplaceable, digitally inflected relationships most people know on some level: heavily mediated by screens, warped by distance, shored up by some level of a digital footprint. The depth of connection not commensurate with the frequency of direct contact. A level of offline feeling that’s more soaring, bruising and flickering, than the words or drama on the page.
The film’s climax, one that should be witnessed and not spoiled, is a measured and searing acceptance of that murkiness. There was a different path, a different life, a singular connection whose formativeness rendered it irreplaceable and irradiating. It’s the type of relationship that’s hard to explain but beautiful to watch three adults handle as adults, and more than deserving of a film smart enough to earn its unsaid yearning.
Past Lives is out in US cinemas now and in the UK on 8 September
