“Past Lives” is a poignant contemplative film about love and choices, beginning in South Korea and ending in New York City as two childhood friend reconnect 24 years later. There’s a sense of both longing and loss. Written and directed by Celine Song, “Past Lives” is a compelling feature film directorial debut.

Korean Canadian Song was born in South Korea and her parents moved the family to Ontario, Canada when she was 12. Her father, Song Neung-han is also a filmmaker. Song received her MFA from Columbia University in 2014. But Song didn’t begin as a filmmaker; her play, “Endings” premiered at the American Repertory Theater in 2019 and its off-Broadway run which opened in March 2020 at the New York Theatre Workshop was curtailed due the close down of theaters for the COVID-19 pandemic.

With “Past Lives,” Song is writing about what she knows and she directs with a sure, but subtle hand. Song did once find herself in an East Village bar, interpreting for her American husband and her visiting South Korean childhood sweetheart.

The film begins in the present at a bar with an unknown couple heard in a voiceover  observing three people who we will come to know as Nora, Hae Sung and Arthur, wondering who these people are to each other.

Who do you think they are to each other?

I don’t know.

Yeah, this is a hard one.

The film flashes back to 24 years before in South Korea where Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) and Hae Sung (Seung Min Lim) are classmates who live near each other. They walk home together, but in class, Na Young comes in first in her class with Hae Sung usually second until one day, their places are reversed. Na Young cries, but Hae Sung comforts her.

Na Young’s family decides to immigrate to Canada and the mothers take the children to an artistic playground where Na Young explains to Hae Sung that she’s moving to Canada because she wants to win a Nobel Prize and no Korean has ever received one for literature. However, you’ll see below, no Canadian had, at that time, received one either.

Twelve years later, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Na Young–now called Nora and played by Greta Lee–reconnect and begin talking over Skype. Both ask the other to come and visit but neither commits. Hae Sung cannot due to his work, but Nora turns away, complaining that she’s stopped writing and working toward winning a Pulitzer because she spends too much time looking at flights to South Korea. Hae Sung is going to China to study  and Nora attends a writing retreat.

Nora is the first person to arrive as if eager to escape from her daily life. She gets to choose which room she will stay in. The last person at the retreat who gets the room leftover is Arthur (John Magaro). Nora begins dating Arthur and, in China, no longer in contact with Nora, Hae Sung begins dating a woman he meets at a local eatery.

With Arthur, Nora talks about the concept of “in-yun” which is something like destiny or fate, but is connected with the Buddhist concept of reincarnation. Lee has explained, “It translates closest to destiny or fate, but actually, it’s a lot more pedestrian and more commonplace than when we say destiny or fate in English.” And yet, perhaps that’s because of what we choose to focus on. Lee added:

“If you brush up against each other in the street, this is also in yun. Even someone who brings you a cup of water, is in yun,” Lee said. “The person who brings you a cup of water is different than your husband, for example. That’s a more serious and deeper in yun.”

That makes sense because if reincarnation means one is somehow always connected to another, that would play out in all aspects of life, both big and small. Yet the point to ponder here is when different choices are made, would that mean in that lifetime, one person plays a bigger role than in the past?

The choices here are all Nora’s. Twelve years after Nora has broken contact with Hae Sung, she is married and living in New York. Arthur writes books that are published and featured in bookstore signing events while Nora is a playwright focusing on her double immigration experiences. Her explanation about her marriage makes it seem like a more pragmatic choice than one of passion. Then Hae Sung again contacts Nora because he’s planning on visiting New York.

The events will eventually lead to the evening at the bar with the three: Nora, Hae Sung and Arthur.  And the film ends after that initial scene.

Song gives us a sensitive, nonjudgmental view of one woman’s life and her life choices and the two men who are affected. So convincing where the two leads that I was surprised to learn that Teo Yoo was not South Korean nor Korean American.

Teo Yoo was born in and educated in Germany, but has studied acting in the UK and the US. Greta Lee was born and raised in Los Angeles and was in the cast of the Netflix series “Russian Doll” and in the second season of the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show.” She did move to New York to pursue a career in acting. John Magaro is both Jewish and Italian American and was in the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black” and “The Umbrella Academy.” Magaro made his Broadway debut in the 2016 Broadway revival of “The Front Page” as an escaped convict.

You can believe that Magaro’s Arthur lives in New York City, but you can also believe that he and Lee’s Nora are in a comfortable relationship and Arthur is almost an accidental means to an end for Nora whose current goal is a Tony Award.

Three Prizes and ‘Past Lives’ 

Nobel Prize is an international prize. The only Korean to have been awarded one was South Korean President Kim Dae-jung (for his “sunshine policy” toward North Korea in 2000.  The Busan, South Korea-born Charles J. Pedersen (1904-1989) was awarded a Nobel Prize jointly with American chemist Donald J. Cram and French chemist Jean-Marie Lehn for “their development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity” in 1987.

However, Koreans have been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. There are Asians who have won the award:

• Mo Yan (China) 2012
• Gao Xingjian (China, France), 2000
• Rabindranath Tagore (British India), 1913
• Shmuel Yosef Agnon (born in Austria-Hungary, but living in Israel), 1966
• Yasunari Kawabata (Japan) 1968
• Kenzaburō  Ōe (Japan) 1994
• Kazuo Ishiguro  (born in Japan, but resides in the UK)
• Orhan Pamuk (Turkey) 2006

As of June 2023, France has received  the most (16), and the US and UK are tied with 13.  One of the Nobel laureates for the US was Pearl Buck (1892-1973) in 1938  “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) is one of the UK Nobel laureates from the UK, receiving his in 1907 at the age of 41, the youngest to date, since the Nobels began in 1901.

There were Canadians who have received the prize. Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was born in Canada, but moved to the US. Alice Munro (b. 1931) was given one in 2013 for short stories. Officially, Canada has only one person with a Nobel Prize for literature and that was awarded after Nora had immigrated since Nora’s family immigrated 24 years before and Munro received the award in 2013 or a decade ago.

The Pulitzer Prize was first awarded I 1917 and is presented by the Columbia University (NYC) for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature and musical composition within the US. Prizes are annually awarded in 21 categories. There are seven categories in letters and drama: biography, drama, fiction, general nonfiction, history (of the US), memoir or autobiography and poetry.

For a woman, according to a 2012 study which used historical data,  “found that female Pulitzer Prize winners are more likely to have greater qualifications than their male counterparts in order to win the coveted award.” However,

Volz saw an increase of female winners after the 1950s through the 1980s, but those winners were more likely to have higher credentials compared to their male counterparts in order to compensate for gender disadvantage For women who did not possess additional qualifications, however, they had a better chance to win a Pulitzer only when working in teams and/or working on local reporting and in-depth reporting. Volz was somewhat encouraged to find that since 1991, there has been no significant statistical difference between male and female winners in their credentials. She says that these findings show gender differences in the type of awards also no longer exist.

The third award that is named in the film is the Tony Awards. The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Broadway Theatre, more commonly known as the Tony Award, was first given in 1947 and is presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League to recognize excellence in live Broadway theater.

While there are special awards such as the Regional Theatre Tony Award, these awards are not given to all theatrical productions in NYC, since it excludes off-Broadway productions.

Within the discourse of the film, “Past Lives,” Nora as a child has big ambitions and supposedly leaves South Korea because no Korean has received a Nobel Award. She wanted to be the big fish of the seven seas, the universe is hers to conquer. Later, Nora says that her current ambition is to get a Pulitzer Prize, meaning that she must work in the US and thus, is turning away from Canada. The US is certainly a bigger country than South Korea, but the US is technically smaller than Canada, yet by population the US has more people. Still, her ambition has shrunken from competing with the world to the US. By the end of the film, she now is determined to win in a still glorious and well-known pool, but this is a smaller pool she means to distinguish herself in.

Yet both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Awards set up a limitation in the film “Past Lives”: Nora must stay in the US and then, she must stay in New York. Returning to South Korea would crush either dream. And that makes her marriage to Arthur a necessary part of her goals in life. This forces one to question the very nature of love and fate and how one’s life is shaped by ambition.

In past decades, such big dreams would not have been open to women. And some of the Pulitzer went to people who explained Asia to the Western world. That time has hopefully ended. Now more people are exposed to the words of Asians and people of Asian descent. As both a playwright and a director, Song may become one of those voices and an important voice for people of Korean and East Asian descent.

“Past Lives” had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival (21 January 2023) and was featured at the LA APFF. It was given a limited release on 2 June 2023 and this weekend will be released nationwide.