“That was the essence and the core of the movie,” Lee said. It’s a piercing moment, and both Lee and Song said nailing it was important. 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. 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. 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. 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. “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.” 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 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. Director Celine Song says “Past Lives” was inspired by an actual awkward meeting in a bar. While the screenplay was inspired by personal events, it’s not entirely autobiographical.īut the bar bit did happen. Their tender reunion leads to a soul-shaking encounter that includes, you guessed it, that crucial time spent in a bar.Įloquently told, the story exudes a lived-it experience. “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.
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.
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