Stories of the boy who meets/loves/loses the girl have become the subject of easy and usually deserved ridicule, the beats typically following those of played-out fiction rather than lived in fact. Despite direct experience of the highs and lows of romance, we’ve grown accustomed to a heavy suspension of disbelief on screen, accepting dusty cliche over the messiness of what we really know.
There can be pleasure to this, especially within a more finely engineered romcom, but it can often add an unnecessary distance, pushing us away when we want to be pulled in close. There are many, many reasons to crumble while watching Celine Song’s skin-tingling debut Past Lives and why it’s the best of this year’s Oscar crop – the look, the sound, the performances – but what affects most is its unusual honesty. Spanning decades and covering continents, the playwright-turned-film-maker’s story of an almost love never makes us question or doubt, partly because the tale is loosely autobiographical but mostly because every decision Song makes is one of almost radical maturity.
It’s a tale of childhood sweethearts meeting again as adults, when one of them is now married, but Song isn’t interested in the easy conflict and rote melodrama this setup suggests and the Academy usually prefers (this is a film where no one even raises their voice). In three graceful chapters, we see 12-year-olds say goodbye when one moves away, twentysomethings reconnect digitally, separated by continent and then finally in their 30s, meeting up in person with all of the confusing, heart-racing emotion that conjures.
Nora, played by Greta Lee in a seamless transition from her more established comedic work, is a woman who had to leave before she could stay, to follow her ambitions to the right place and to the right man and when she meets her old friend once again, she isn’t looking for a way out. But Hae Sung, played with delicacy by Teo Yoo, reminds her of a time and a place and a life she could have had, not exactly better but different, and a person she could have been in it. The questions she asks herself as a woman now in a happy marriage do not amount to a betrayal of the world they have created but the experience of seeing him again adds a full stop to a sentence that didn’t end. Song uses the Korean concept of in-yun, which refers to the many past lives we may have lived, as a way to elegantly through-line the relatable game we all play with age, of wondering what could have been.
It’s not just the scenes between Nora and Hae Sung that pierce, as they reminisce while walking around the city (Song shoots New York with such love, it made me vow to never leave) but it’s the ones of Nora at home with her husband, thoughtfully played by John Magaro, that also leave an indelible impression. There’s the pulse-quickening idea of love and then there’s the reassuring warmth of real love, shown most beautifully in the hair-raising last shot as he waits for her on their stoop and holds her as she cries. In closing the loop, Song manages so many remarkably grown-up moments of tenderness and understanding, that I found myself a little overwhelmed. It really shouldn’t feel as bracing as it does, to see adults acting as such, but in keeping her characters firmly on the ground, living in our world, Song’s film reaches that much higher.
More specifically geared to a certain generation, who rediscovered school friends via Facebook and played out dizzy romantic fantasies on Skype, Past Lives still has a soaring, old-fashioned sweep to it, which might help to explain its appeal to older voters, securing its inclusion on the best picture list this year. It’s not going to win, sadly (it received just one other nomination) but for so many of us, the deep feelings being summoned will last far longer than the duration of an awards season, an ache of what could have been in this life and the mystery of what might be in the next.
