Past Lives (Celine Song, 2023) (Patreon)

Yesterday the National Society of Film Critics (of which I'm a member) voted Past Lives the best film of 2023. Embarrassingly, I had not seen it, although I intended to catch up with it. Now, having seen the film, I'm just confused. Song is a playwright, and Past Lives is her filmmaking debut. Would some aspects of Past Lives be more evocative on the stage? I sort of doubt it, since so much of what Song attempts here is an extended depiction of digital mediation of distance, a statement on How We Live Now, grafted onto specific aspects of the immigrant experience. Na Young (Greta Lee) moves from South Korea to Canada, and then alone as an adult to New York. Her parents encourage her to adopt an English name, and she chooses Nora. And so, the woman has two names for her two distinct lives. Symbolism, perhaps?

Despite moving away as a child, Nora experiences a highly discontinuous friendship with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). By discontinuous, I mean they never forget each other, and use the internet to find each other at roughly twelve-year intervals. We know this because the "acts" of the film begin with titles that say "12 YEARS LATER." What is odd about these temporal ellipses is that we observe next to no change in either Nora or Hae Sung, or the world around them. Without the intertitles, I doubt we'd perceive any time lapse, aside from Nora's changing aspirations. (As a young girl she tells Hae Sung she wants to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Later, she wants a Pulitzer, and finally a Tony.)

In the lingo of Method acting, "indicating" is when an actor signals certain emotions to the audience through action or gesture without actually summoning up the emotion within themselves. Now, it's an open question whether this is really a problem, since Bertolt Brecht would probably say all performance is "indicating," and rightly so. Regardless, I bring this up because Past Lives is a film explicitly about romantic longing and the nagging questions regarding the road not taken. We know this, because the characters tell us this, many times. But do we feel this, or even see it? A bit like a faded, nth-generation xerox of In the Mood For Love, Past Lives turns everything down so low -- acting, visual style, emotional stakes -- that it's very close to being absolutely muted.

So why is it resonating "with audiences and critics alike"? Well, for one thing, don't underestimate the promotional muscle of A24. But more than that, I think Past Lives is a relatively safe film to praise. It checks certain politically fashionable boxes, such as a multi-ethnic cast and an "American" story not focused exclusively on white people. And Nora's husband (John Maguro) is a white Jewish man whose whiteness is emphasized, by the character and the film itself. But I think it also reflects a generational shift in aesthetic sensibilities. Past Lives resembles Peak TV, but more than this, it participates in a broad trend in popular art, telling its viewer exactly what it is and what it means, as if to ward off disagreement or conflicting interpretations. It's liberal multiculturalism's newest guise, offering the vague outline of an emotional journey, so that we reflect on difference rather than engaging with it.