NEW YORK – Celine Song was 12 when she moved to Ontario from South Korea. Her parents gave her the chance to choose a new first name. There are differing theories within her family as to how she (then Ha Young) chose Celine.
“My father insists it’s from a French film” “Célline and Julie go boating”, says Song, whose father is a filmmaker. “But I have a feeling there just happens to be a Celine Dion CD lying around.”
The transition was difficult at first. Song, used to being a successful student, had to learn English. It wasn’t until years later — after Song became an aspiring playwright, moved to New York, and got married — that she realized something entirely different about her cultural divide.
Song was sitting in an East Village bar with her white American husband and a visiting Korean childhood sweetheart. Neither spoke the other language, so Song was their only bridge, the only way they could communicate and the only reason this unlikely threesome had been brought together.
“I remember having this feeling that I’ve always had: a feeling on my shoulder because I’m ESL or I didn’t grow up with the English language,” says Song. “But then I sat there and I was like, ‘No, I feel so, so powerful. I felt like a wizard or a superhero. These two worlds collapse – time and space fold – because of me. And all I had to do was exist. I just had to be myself and that was enough.”
Song begins her directorial debut, “Past Lives,” by dramatizing this moment. From there, drawing heavily on her own life, her film dives through flashbacks that brought these characters together and through the twists and turns that could have so easily taken them elsewhere.
A Sundance Film Festival breakthrough hit and one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, Past Lives is both an unusually thoughtful love story and an unusually soulful immigration story.
Greta Lee plays Nora, a Korean-Canadian playwright modeled on Song who, as she grows up, reconnects sporadically with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), a childhood friend in Seoul. When he comes to New York 24 years later, Nora is happily married to Arthur (John Magaro). Rather than triggering a melodramatic love triangle, the visit brings out something gentler and more indescribable about love, destiny and identity.
“I can’t explain to each other in one sentence who we are,” Song said in a recent interview. “I can’t just say identity, identity, identity. It’s much more about what it’s like to exist as a threesome and what it’s like for everyone to see the other people in the trio.”
For the trio Song, Lee and Yoo, the making of Past Lives was also an experience of profound connection.
Lee, the 40-year-old Russian Doll actor, was born in Los Angeles to Korean immigrants. Yoo was born and raised in Germany, but has lived in Seoul for years after marrying a Korean woman. Everyone knows a lot about living with two cultures and the space in between.
“When I read the script, I liked it so much that it wasn’t about any kind of stare, neither a white stare nor a male stare,” says Lee. “It was just telling a very universal story about destiny and falling in love that felt very liberating, as if it opened up the possibility of showing some kind of immigration experience in a very calm but also bold way that isn’t performative or finger pointing.”
Lee received particular praise for her subtle, understated performance as a woman who is not torn between two romantic interests but takes a look at her past before launching into her future as an artist. For Song, the film is a farewell series in which the first attempts do not work. She even considers it a “CSI”-esque “conformation movie where you lift the sheet over the dead body.”
Lee had never been so involved in a role – a gift, but also a daunting task.
“It had to be completely naked to achieve that level of clarity and raw honesty,” says Lee. “There is no mask.”
Lee expresses Greta’s agitated feelings underneath instead. As grounded as “Past Lives” is, Lee and Song’s conversations turned cosmic as they contemplated how to capture something bigger.
“The joke that started it all was: how can we tell this story in a way that feels like science fiction, that defies genre conventions and feels like we’re talking about something much bigger than a love triangle?” says Lee. “We talked about portals. Really. Leap through time and space.”
song who is The 2020 track “Endings” Also, being an autobiographical playwright character, she went to some extremes to lead her cast towards organic, naturalistic performances. She had Yoo and Magaro meet on camera for the first time to emulate the awkwardness of their characters’ encounter. And since Nora and Hae have an intense but unlived attraction, Yoo was also forbidden from physically touching Lee.
“I think Celine was kind of a sadist,” Yoo says, laughing.
Yoo found himself in the ironic position of playing a traditional Korean, the opposite of what he usually plays in Korea due to his European upbringing. He grew up with a melancholy sense of displacement that he only discovered when he was 15, watching Korean and Hong Kong films on TV, he says.
“Even though it was dubbed into German, there was a cinematic grammar that I understood that didn’t make me feel lonely anymore,” says Yoo. “That shaped my path to becoming an actor.”
In Past Lives, Yoo actually speaks his third language, Korean. For him, his life has become richer in diversity. Speaking German, English and Korean, he says, is like “colors blending together.”
“I had to relearn my identity. I had a kind of reverse culture shock,” he says of moving to Korea. “But there is something beautiful about learning from the fight. Her emotional color palette kind of expands.”
Expressing this complexity of identity was what Song wanted to achieve with “Past Lives”. The story is not a simple dichotomy of American and Korean life. The language of identity, says Song — like the term “Korean Canadian” — can be limiting. Her life, like any other, is full of paths she didn’t take and relationships she didn’t choose.
“I could have stayed in Canada. I could have moved to LA entirely. I could have decided not to marry my husband. There are just so many ways our journey can succeed,” says Song, who lives in New York with her spouse. “In my case, it’s a bit more extreme because it’s a continent up.”
“Past Lives,” she says, is about seeing people as individuals. “For me, it’s about three people working really hard to treat each other like adults and not put each other first,” says Song. “Something like this happens all the time in real life and is always moving.”
Characters in the film often speak of the concept of in-yun, which refers to all encounters, even brief ones, as definite connections that have the potential to resonate. However, the most powerful In-Yun in “Past Lives” is the connection between the song and a film camera.
“It felt like something collapsed on me. “It felt like a revelation,” Song says of filmmaking. “It was like meeting the love of your life.”
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Follow AP film writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
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