It seems oddly apt to be talking to Celine Song about her movie Past Lives via Zoom in New York.
Yes, she will be presenting her directorial debut in person as a guest of the Whānau Marama: New Zealand International Film Festival. But some of the most affecting scenes in her quietly heart-aching love story, which traverses continents, decades, and the Korean concept of inyeon from which the film gets its title, are conversations between two people on Skype.
On one side of the calls is Canadian-Korean New Yorker Na Young/Nora (Greta Lee). On the other is her one-time sweetheart from her childhood in Seoul, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). They haven’t seen each other nor been in touch since Nora’s family crossed the Pacific 12 years earlier and she Anglicised her name.
At first, seeing each other in their mid-twenties for the first time, the pair can’t manage much more than “woah”. But their Skype calls become a regular thing, their long chats punctuated by the glitches of early video-call technology.
It might seem a simple scene to bring off. Just film one side of the conversation and then the other. But Song insisted on doing it practically, though without her characters in different time zones, just different rooms. She had the crew rig up a throttle between the two computers that allowed her to screw up the connection without warning the actors.
“We really tried to recreate what it was like to do Skype at that time. Which is that it was crappy.
“But it’s also about what’s amazing about technology – when Nora and Hae Sung first see each other over Skype, it’s like a sci-fi miracle … and they are so thankful for the technology, but over time they become more intimate, and they want to get closer and to touch each other, and the technology goes from being a miracle to being frustrating.”
Song is also Canadian-Korean. She studied and now lives in New York, where her career as a playwright has inched towards the screen. She’s been a writer on the Amazon Prime fantasy series Wheel of Time.
Past Lives is a world away from that show. It’s based on her own experience. She too left a childhood sweetheart in Korea after her family shifted, and reconnected with him later, platonically. In the film, her Nora character doesn’t encounter Hae Sung in person for another 12 years after the Skype fling and she’s since married a US fellow writer.
Song says the idea for the film came when she was in an East Village bar with her husband and her former beau and was translating between them. This is a scene replicated at the film’s start and near its end with Hae Sung, Nora and husband Arthur, in which fellow patrons can be heard trying to figure out what the relationship is between the trio.
“It’s an adaptation of some things that happened in my life – a romanticisation.”
That involves an opening chapter about the pair’s childhood friendship in Seoul. There, the taciturn Hae Sung is the quiet support to Nora’s ambitious but sensitive overachiever.
Filming in Seoul, Song says, was a little art-imitating-life as she had to translate between her American and local crews. It made for a nice distraction from the occasional crisis of confidence she had that came with being a first-time film-maker.
Since debuting at Sundance in January then releasing in the US in June, Past Lives has topped the Metacritic review aggregator website as the best-reviewed film of 2023.
Unsurprisingly, Song is chuffed at the critical response, but she’s also heartened that audiences have connected so strongly with a film about “ordinary people doing something extraordinary, which is to love across time and space and continents”.
“It’s not just, ‘wow, they like my movie’, it’s also that I feel less lonely.”
The film may prove a breakthrough for Los Angeles-born Greta Lee, until now best known for her snarky comedic supporting turns in the likes of Russian Doll and The Morning Show. Lee has her own theory about the bilingual film’s unique appeal.
“It feels subversive. It feels like this is like some new stuff, new territory that we’re crossing into … in the past, we’ve thought of a story like this centred around someone who looks like me, someone who’s Asian-American, as being a kind of bespoke identity piece that is maybe catering to just a small, imaginary audience way over here in a corner. But you have this hope of what an American film could be and to see it connecting with so many people is incredible – and hard to grasp.”
Past Lives is in the Whānau Marama: NZ International Film Festival throughout the month with Song attending screenings in Auckland on August 2 and 3. The film goes on general release at the end of the month.
