'Past Lives': Chance meeting in bar inspired one of 2023's best films

Associated more often as the scenario in which bad decisions go down late at night and logic gets tossed back like a watered-down gin and tonic, an exchange in a bar one night in New York led to something much different — one of the best movies of 2023.

"Past Lives," opening June 9 in Bay Area theaters, centers on two South Korean childhood chums who parted ways meet again on the East Coast after two decades of intermittent Facebook and Skype exchanges. Their tender reunion leads to a soul-shaking encounter that includes, you guessed it, that crucial time spent in a bar.

Eloquently told, the story exudes a lived-it experience. While the screenplay was inspired by personal events, it's not entirely autobiographical.

But the bar bit did happen.

"I found myself in this very odd situation of sitting between my husband, who I’ve been with for years, and my childhood sweetheart (from South Korea) who I’ve known long ago," recalls Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song. She's earning raves for her confident feature debut, which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival and was featured at SFFILM Fest, where Song and lead actor Greta Lee appeared.

"I was sitting there and translating between them not only in language but also in culture, and while doing that I think I was starting to notice the way that some of the servers or the people at the bar were, like, looking at us because we were such a strange group because we felt so disparate but we were talking kind of intimately."

That epiphanous moment not only compelled playwright Song — who also wrote an episode of the Amazon Prime fantasy series "The Wheel of Time" as well as the plays "Endlings" and "The Seagull on The Sims 4" — to create "Past Lives." It also became the film's opening scene. It's a defining opening, with audiences assuming the roles of curious onlookers to the interactions and gestures of this trio — playwright Nora (Lee of Apple TV+'s "The Morning Show"), her novelist husband Arthur (John Magaro of "First Cow") and her South Korean childhood friend Hae Sung (Teo Yoo of "Seoul Searching").

From the synopsis, it sounds like "Past Lives" would fit snugly into the standard love triangle built around conflict and wraps things up with a smile and pat resolution.

Song's film aims higher. It raises potent issues about what gets sacrificed when we place our cultural roots on the back burner and how the relationships we are currently in guide us and how there are limits to what our partners can fully experience from our lives.

Partly for that reason, Song and Lee liken "Past Lives" to being a bit of a mystery and a ghost story (it's mentioned in the script) where the specter of something before lingers in the present. That theme also figures in how Song introduces the Korean concept of in-yun, which theorizes that we are bonded by past lives that have led us to who we are, and who we are with, in the present.

Tapping in a more subdued way into that philosophy required many conversations, particularly obsessive conversations over how to pull off that almost haunted look Nora takes on when she gazes into the camera at the bar. It's a piercing moment, and both Lee and Song said nailing it was important.

"That was the essence and the core of the movie," Lee said. "And from the moment that I read the script, it was the really specific and undeniable sense of both immediate intimacy and like this radical kind of restraint that felt powerfully quiet but also huge and expansive. And we kind of joked that it's a mystery movie, it's also a sci-fi movie and a romantic drama. Like it feels cosmic in this way that I think is really refreshing. And I’ve never seen that before and I’ve never been a part of that before."

The opening sequence in "Past Lives" sets the emotional space for a quiet tear-your-heart-out closing sequence, one that required all the actors, in particular Lee and Yoo, to convey so much through gazes and body language. The scene almost turns into an extended tracking shot that seems long, but actually runs under two minutes.

"I really wasn't thinking of the length so much as what the whole thing had to feel like, which was one very, very long breath that you’re holding," Song said.

That comparison helped Lee pull the scene off. She also credits her castmates and the evocative cinematography of Shabier Kirchner. Gorgeous to behold, "Past Lives" was shot in 35 mm and filmed in New York and South Korea.

What also helped the actors deliver such organic performances was Song's insistence that they not touch each other until the screenplay called for it and for Magaro and Yoo to not rehearse their scenes together prior to the day they shot their scenes.

What makes "Past Lives" unique is its nuance, and that no one plays a villain, no one comes out looking better than the other.

One of the most complex subjects brought up pertains to Arthur, who is deeply in love with Nora and realizes he can't fully fathom her life before him.

"(Arthur's) effort to understand her is heroic and makes us root for him in a way that's very different from how we root for Nora or Hae Sung because it should be acknowledged that he doesn't have access and he can't claim to have access to the part that she shares with Hae Sung. Arthur has to accept that is not something that he can know. And to be accepting that is enough heroism and generosity in that character."

Lee concurs. "That's real love," she said. "Acknowledging the complexity of the situation and saying I love you… . And that's what makes us an unconventional love story."

Contact Randy Myers at [email protected].

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