Editor’s note: This article is part of CNN Style’s Hyphenated series, which explores the complex issue of identity among minorities in the United States.
CNN
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Greta Lee isn’t afraid to mess with her co-stars.
The actor sat down with John Magaro and Teo Yoo for an interview about their film Past Lives, an achingly beautiful romantic drama about the experiences of a Korean immigrant in the US. One question about the recent spate of Asian American stories in the spotlight seemed timely.
“John, you have to take this one,” Lee said flatly. To his credit, Magaro did, for a serious, meandering minute or so before Lee, laughing, interrupted with a response of his own.
“The idea of what makes an American film itself is changing,” she told CNN. “For a long time now, a lot of people, myself included, have felt so strongly about who gets to be the storyteller—who gets to hold the storytelling baton.”
Their film is a testament to what happens when that stick is in the right hands. Past Lives, by Korean-Canadian writer and director Celine Song, is largely autobiographical. It tells the story of Nora, a character who moves from Korea to Canada as a child and later lives in the United States. As a thirty-year-old living in New York with her writer husband Arthur, she is visited by Hae Sung, her childhood sweetheart, who makes her wonder what her life would have been like if she hadn’t left.
The film’s grand arc is drawn from Song’s own life, in which she, like Nora, has built a career as a playwright in New York. Prior to Past Lives, Song wrote the stage play Endlings, which debuted in 2019 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with its subsequent run in New York cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic. She has also written for Amazon’s fantasy series The Wheel of Time.
Past Lives was her first screenplay. So strong was the script, and so inseparable from Song’s life, that the production company A24 offered her to direct the film, despite having no previous experience in such a role.
John Pack
Theo Yu and Greta Lee as childhood friends reunited in Past Lives.
Song describes the screenwriting process as one of “turning the subjective into the objective,” adding that she wrote “Past Lives” with an audience of one person: herself. “That has always been true,” she said. “I’m going to be a harsher critic than I think most audience members are, because I know my own shit.”
Elegantly structured in three acts spanning 24 years, we first meet 12-year-old Nora as a child in Korea, on the verge of leaving. We then revisit her as a student in New York, reconnecting with Hae Sung online. Just as we see the city—and the career and relationship opportunities it provides—nurture Nora’s talents, we catch a glimpse of Hye Sung, seemingly stagnant in her absence, doing his mandatory military service and living in Seoul, a city that seems only to isolate . Finally, we meet them reunited, with all the baggage that comes with adulthood; her stability, but also her disappointments, big and small.
The script of the song is spare but insightful. We feel the presence of the vast stretches of life between them without needing to see them.
“The mystery of time and space and how one experiences it is so confusing,” Song said. “The purpose of this film was for me to bring clarity to it or to be able to see those parts of what it is to be human through a clearer lens.”
John Pack
Celine Song directed Greta Lee on location during the production of Past Lives.
None of Song’s clarity would translate without the right Nora. The character needed “a burning passion, a bit of ambition (and) a lot of inner strength,” the director recalled. “I found in Greta all these things. She can feel like a grown woman one moment and a little girl the next. That wonderful contradiction in one actor is what I was looking for.”
Lee, whose previous credits include prominent supporting roles on Netflix’s Russian Doll and Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, has never hosted a film before. Born in Los Angeles to a family of Korean immigrants, she said, “From the beginning, we talked about having access to just the experience of being bicultural and bilingual, which is something very personal to me.”
The usual cinematic conventions of a romantic drama, of a woman “still clinging to her identity or what her life wants” don’t fit, Lee added. “We talked about telling a story from a different place: from a woman who knows exactly what she wants, is full of ambition and is very stable.”
While undeniably romantic, the film is also a self-reflexive, subversive response to the romantic drama, in which the author allows her literary-minded characters to feel aware of the genre’s expectations—and its disconnect with reality. “What a good story this is…I just can’t compete,” Arthur muses in one scene, discussing Nora’s date. “Shut up,” she replies.
Convention suggests that Hae Sung’s reappearance in Nora’s life should lead to what the audience can identify as an agonizing choice: Will she stay or warp? Nora’s sense of security is antithetical to genre and this issue. In fact, questions of the heart provide something of a portal for the film to consider a broader exploration of selfhood. Hae Sung reveals the face of Nora’s life in South Korea, but what her life might have been like if she and her family had stayed is a question bigger than him or them.
Courtesy A24
Greta Lee, John Magaro and Theo Yu in Past Lives. The film dispenses with the need for a bad guy in its romantic drama. “It’s really about three adults doing their best to act like adults,” Lee said.
A similar thought exercise was a key element of last year’s best picture Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere at Once,” in which laundromat owner Evelyn (Michelle Yeo) wonders what it would be like if she had never left China for the United States. The film reveals these possibilities through the multiverse. Past Lives eschews such visual literalism, using its romantic totems Hae Sung and Arthur instead. In their presence, Nora finds herself torn between the Korean and North American parts of her identity. This can collide. Nora is shocked at how American she feels with Hae Sung, a revelation to which Arthur poignantly adds that she only ever speaks Korean in her sleep.
It can also be cruel. Who is Nora? “You’re a go-getter,” Hae Sung says.
“This story is about a very extreme kind of leaving,” Song said, but added, “there’s a part of the story that I think we can all relate to when we grow up… This movie, I think at the end of the day, is about the ways we change as people.
“It’s really about three adults doing their best to act like adults,” claims Lee. Song abandons the need for a bad guy—as Magaro’s character Arthur wryly notes, in most versions of this love story he would be “the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny”—to no less impactful ends.
“You don’t need a super villain who’s out to destroy the world to feel a life-or-death stake,” Magaro said. “I think (that’s) why a lot of people connect with this movie … And it’s because our personal relationships, our marriages, our families — our need for love — are life and death for us.”
Courtesy A24
Teo Yoo and Greta Lee as Hae Sung and Nora in Past Lives, whose relationship between them is not easily defined.
In Past Lives, the concept of inyeon permeates the narrative. The word is not directly translatable from Korean to English, describing the lifelong bonds between two people. For Nora and Hae Sung, it fills a void, describing who they are to each other: not quite friends, not lovers, not exes. They are inyeon – and in that label there is strength and comfort in both what it means and what it doesn’t.
The film’s reception, resonance and ideas have been overwhelmingly positive following its premieres at both the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, and its limited release in the US has earned strong box office returns ahead of its domestic debut in theaters on the 23 June.
“What people want has always been the same: to feel connected to art and also to each other,” Song said.
How does it feel to hear that her own story has resonated with others?
“I think it makes me feel less alone,” Song said. “It makes me feel like I’m not the only one, in a deep way. I think with every audience member that sees the film, I feel more connected to the world.”
That feeling may not be right now, but it’s not far away. And there is comfort in that too.
Past Lives opens in US theaters nationwide starting Friday.