Celine Song on Past Lives

Talking to Celine Song over a slightly janky Skype call feels a little like re-enacting an early scene from her acclaimed debut film Past Lives. In the movie, Nora (Greta Lee) reconnects with her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) over a video call, having left him behind many years ago when her family immigrated from Korea. She watches as a face she hasn’t seen since childhood comes flickering into life on the screen of her laptop, like a piece of the past has been beamed directly into her New York apartment. And then the call promptly freezes. 

“I wanted the Skype to be crappy,” Song explains. “I wanted Skype to feel at first like a miracle – you’re like ‘I can talk to my friend 14 hours away, that’s so amazing!’ – and then over time it becomes a frustration, a thing that is a limitation.” Although the calls themselves soon begin to run a lot smoother, Hae Sung and Nora still find themselves bumping against the borders of their digital relationship. “As their desire to reach over and touch each other and as their desire to be more intimate grows, actually the technology becomes very frustrating,” Song says. 

It was the desire to explore this particular sort of relationship that led Song – already a successful playwright – to write Past Lives for the screen rather than the stage. “The difference between theatre and film is that theatre is happening in a figurative space and film happens in a literal space,” she explains. “This story spans decades and continents, and the villain of the story – if there is a villain of the story – is the Pacific Ocean and 24 years.  So because of that, you wanted the time and space to feel very vivid and very lived-in and seen literally.”

It’s a fascinating example of the way modern technology can collapse time and space, an idea Song has experimented with before. During lockdown, she used The Sims 4 to put on a performance of Chekov’s The Seagull, creating a whole new sort of shared theatrical experience at a time when the conventional one had become impossible. However, Past Lives really turns on the moment when Hae Sung decides to bridge that gap himself, flying out to New York so that he and Nora can meet in person for the first time in their adult lives. 

In a summer where we’ve witnessed nuclear bomb tests, motorcycle cliff dives and Ken-on-Ken warfare, their meeting still might be the most heart-stopping moment of the season. But it’s also a necessarily incomplete one since Nora is now married to a man named Arthur (John Magaro). While this might seem like the setup for an explosive, melodramatic finale in which Nora’s fate is set by the man she chooses, Song’s film consciously dodges these conventions to get after something deeper. “It’s easy to think of it like ‘which guy is she going to choose’ but she’s going to choose her own life,” says Song. "Which means she is also going to choose love.” And that’s what Past Lives is really about – not the practice of picking and partnering, or the more practical aspects of modern romantic life, but love itself. 

“I feel like often when we talk about our love lives or the way that love works, I think that there is a funny thing where we’re only really talking about a specific kind of romantic love which is connected to dating,” Song explains. “But dating is, at the end of the day, about the marketplace. It’s about acquisition. There’s a lot of calculation that is often a part of dating. It’s like ‘I’m not going to date someone who has that job’ or somebody who isn’t tall enough. But love is something that you give without wanting anything in return. It’s something that you give without there being any tangible reason for it.”

Past Lives has drawn comparisons to a number of other films – its soft-spoken exploration of love means it could fit snugly into Richard Linklater’s Before series, while the way it plays with the notion of star-crossed lovers is almost akin to Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name. But when it comes to her own understanding of how love exists within her film, Song reaches straight for the classics: Casablanca. "It really is ‘we’ll always have Paris’ in a way," Song says. "We’ll always have that corner in Seoul. We’ll always have that goodbye.”

Near the end of our talk, Song admits that she’s not quite sure where the future will take her in an industry that seems to make less and less room for these sorts of quiet, character-led dramas. But at least film lovers can rest assured that, no matter what happens from here, we’ll always have Past Lives. 

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Past Lives is screening at Edinburgh International Film Festival on 20 & 21 Aug and is released 8 Sep by Studiocanal