PAST LIVES and the Art of Quiet Yearning (Patreon)

I feel like I’ve spent the last thirteen years trying to get the world to think about the simple timing of story information. Because so many storytellers fall into the traps of convolution. They’ll delay, they’ll hint, they’ll meaninglessly fracture stories, and create fake conflicts through miscommunication. They’ll even hide basic character motivations and pose them as “reveals.” It’s easy to chalk these instincts up to “wanting to be different,” but enough time has gone by that I realize nine times out of ten it is just people hiding the fact they don’t really know how to do traditional drama at all. You just see their stories going beat by beat, thinking only of demonstration and affectation, and constantly throwing the audience into situations and then relying on retroactive explanation to justify it on the fly. But if you have to explain in the moment then it’s already too late. Because it’s all missing the simplest and most crucial thing. You just want to establish how the characters feel / what they want / why they want it / and then putting them in a situation where those feelings come to a head. The kind of natural, real conflict that is the space between two people’s feelings and their competing goals. It’s the old Mamet rules: Who wants what? What happens if they don’t get it? Why now? Because if you keep the conflict simple and deeply felt…

Then the audience can feel the drama even in silence.

What I’m arguing for probably makes sense to you in terms of intimate little period dramas or something, but it’s true even for big blockbusters. Because it’s all about dramatic clarity when Hitchcock mines silence with a bomb under the table. And emotional yearning is the basic engine of a rom coms and the classic love stories that have powered everything from Casablanca to Raiders of the Lost Ark. There is want, tension, fighting, and all building to that moment, that feeling where you want character X and character Y to act upon the internal, and then they say the line or action that achieves some deeper act of catharsis, whether its a kiss or putting the person you love on a plane forever. It’s about that clear feeling in the silence of the lingering moment. And you achieve that sense of yearning by the audience already understanding everything about them. Which is to say…

I finally saw Past Lives and it is a testament to virtually all of this.

It’s because [spoilers for the film] you know everything from the top. Starting with the simple question, who are these three people? Hae Sung, Nora, and Arthur start as a simple projection from some unseen strangers. But then it dives back for the whole story. Hae Sung and Nora (then Na Young) were each other’s childhood crushes. It’s that powerful thing of first love, requited in the form of a held hand in a car. It’s easy to chalk these things up as “innocent,” but they are deeply real and formative. The moments where our hearts suddenly open to the possibility of life. And just like that, she’s whisked away in a dream of immigration. I’ll admit, that only knowing the vague premise I didn’t expect there to be such clarity of their feelings from the onset.  And I definitely didn’t expect them to double down on those feelings with zoom romance twelve years later. It was a heart wrenching sequence (especially if you’ve ever done long distance relationships like that). To be completely in love, but having that constant, crushing reality of time, distance, and practicality hammering it from all sides. And thus, to make that decision, to close yourself off from the pains of practicality, is the kind of tragedy that feels so deeply unfair in the scheme of life - where it's often so hard to even feel that way in the first place. But the clarity of this feeling, and our reciprocal feelings for their love, powers the film’s last half completely.

Both of them have moved on to new lives in fits of practicality. And earnestly so in many ways. But the last half takes the form of a three day visit from Hae Sung, one so long and overdue. Technically, he’s trying to decide what to do in his own possibility of marriage, but he comes to see her because deep down, he wants to be with her. There’s a moment I cried just watching as Hae Sung is nervously waiting at the intended meeting spot. He’s constantly arranging himself, as if suddenly hyper aware of his body and every single thing inside of him. We know this feeling, just when we are so deeply nervous to see someone and the butterflies are going everywhere (and I just have to say that Teo Yoo’s performance is incredible). And then they see each other and all they say is “woah” because it's so overwhelming. But we don’t need them to put the words to the feelings. We know everything they’re feeling already. And we are simply given the space to feel it alongside them.

From there, we explore their “simple” wants, but the real-world results are anything but simple. But note the way this works because we know exactly where the tension is. Take the way that so much was summed up when Nora comes home and tells Arthur, “you were right” about the reason he came was for her. There will be no secrets here. No fake conflict of misunderstanding. In fact, that night Aruthur outlines his exact set of fears. Because he fully understands the nature of their story, along with the complexity of how she’s feeling. There’s no mystery. You know exactly where the tension is. Which means it’s all about the tension of how he is going to react.

A great scene that exemplifies this is the exact moment Hae Sung and Nora come into the apartment and we see him looking at this phone. There’s this little delay in his behavior and you think “oh, is he mad? Ready to be stand-offish?” And instead we realize he’s concentrating and practicing his Korean to do a proper introduction to their guest. Deep down, you know these two people want the same thing in their lives, but more than that, they want to show understanding of each other most of all. And their dinner / drinks together is so quietly enthralling. Celine Song is careful in her direction of these scene (to the point there were a couple moments throughout the film that I was *dying* for a close up, but this is perhaps part of the yearning we want of the emotions bubbling below the surface). And as the reactions come, it is lines “I did not expect liking your husband to hurt this much,” that help keep everything on the table precisely as they feel it. All leading to the tender conversation of bittersweet happiness about how much he sees her life in New York, fully as it is.

Every moment of this film is a testament to the fact that storytellers don’t have to hide narrative information. It can be all on the table, precisely so we can feel it all. But what about the arc, you ask? The arc is the most important lesson of all: them truly coming to understand, and most of all, accept the tragedies of timing and circumstance. The pain is that they have to hold all that tragedy and love in their final staring scene, just aching there in the precious few seconds they have before the car comes and that’s that. And after that whole time, Arthur is just there to be a part of the release as Nora finally just cries with full on abandon. Because it's all so much. Some people love to put their feelings into containers, as if letting them get shaped by the vessel they are put into it. But we have enough feelings to spill out, to splash the walls, and to fill the oceans if they’ll let us. There’s so many people in the world and it’s the constant tragedy of all the endless intersections that never quite line-up. But in the space of drama, you don’t need the fate of the world to fall into someone’s hands, just the quiet space of yearning. Because there…

You feel the oceans, too.

<3HULK