“Past Lives”, by South Korean director Celine Song, who joined the restricted group of those who manage to take a debut film to the Oscars, is not a devastating love story, it is a devastating love story. Loves, because there are several: the love for the person with whom you share your days, the love for the childhood friend and passion that life tried to leave there, the love for yourself and for the identity that you chose and chooses. Devastating, because these loves collide with each other. “We all have lives we left behind”, Nora (played brilliantly by actress Greta Lee) tells us, about a plot that boils down to “what if?” – three-letter question that eats us all up a little at some point in our lives. And that’s why this film leaves us swallowing hard at the end. It could be us there.
Made of reunions and lost opportunities, confronting us with choices, with the concept of destiny and with a love that transcends time, the plot follows the relationship/non-relationship of Nora (Korean-American) and Hae Sung (too Korean for her), over more than two decades that take them to distant physical and mental spaces. We can identify three key moments in the story: childhood in Seoul, when Nora (who, at the time, was still called Na Young) emigrates with her parents to Canada; that of early adulthood, when social networks allow a rapprochement that begins to reveal the frustration of disagreements; and, several years later, the reunion of the two, who stroll together in New York, with Nora’s American boyfriend at her side. I don’t dare compare degrees of love here, but, in all these phases, you can see Hae’s greater commitment to keeping Nora in his life than the other way around: in children, when saying goodbye seems to cost the boy much more; in young people, when it is their decision to stop speaking again; and in adults, when he heads to the United States just to try to live his “what if?” and Nora remains unwilling to give up the life, the culture and, above all, the identity that she created. And, in the end, the accumulated silences of unlived lives loom large and overflow through their eyes.
