Past Lives (2023)

directed by Celine Song

Kate Fishman

It’s been a year living in our new home. The city feels like a barely-scratched surface, but I’m restless. Though I hate moving, I also tick perennially toward that near-total spring cleaning I’ve known the past few years: car filled to bursting, apartment emptied to chilly blankness.

My partner and I have moved three times in as many years since graduating from college mid-pandemic. I feel shaken up every time—but the disorientation is a lively opposite to the gray wash of days in isolation. Now this, I found myself thinking last summer, staring wide-eyed through the windshield on the drive down I-5. Now this.

How vivid each passing scene feels in the middle of wondering what will come next. Halfway to the new city, we walked to Taco Bell for dinner and brought the spoils back to our motel room for one of my life’s best-remembered meals. When we got to the apartment, we wandered up and down the block at twilight and I stared at purple blossoms stretching skyward from a neighbor’s tree, thinking they looked like cyanotype against the evening’s watery lavender. That week I took myself to the movie theater for a discounted 11 a.m. showing, where Past Lives cast itself on me like a spell.

Past Lives is the story of Na Young, who immigrates from Seoul with her family at 12 and leaves behind her crush Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) to become Nora (Greta Lee), a playwright living in New York. She marries another writer, Arthur (John Magaro). Decades on, Hae Sung visits them in New York. With him implicitly come Nora’s alternate universes, a different light by which to see where she ended up. The film loves its relationships: the exploratory mutual amazement of childhood friends, the married couple’s quiet intimacy.

When Arthur bemoans his and Nora’s story in comparison with the ocean-crossing epic of her and Hae Sung, she says simply and without resignation, “This is my life, and I’m living it with you.” But the movie’s also about how hard it is not knowing what might have happened had she never left at all.

“You get what you bring into Past Lives,” the film critic Fran Hoepfner wrote. I agree. I think that holds true for the best love triangles—the point is not discerning the winning pair at all, but rather examining the self’s many vantages. Bringing my heartachey 24-year-old self to Past Lives, I felt deeply soothed by the film’s grounding concept of in-yun: that layers of fate and connection in our past lives must exist to bring us together for even an instant in the present. That you’re someone else in another life, and that person is part of who you become today.

Developmentally, I think I’m only just coming to terms with the accumulation of life’s choices. Turning to movies for solace in this, I felt held by Past Lives—and confronted by another love triangle I saw for the first time this year in Take This Waltz.

Take This Waltz, which hit theaters a decade ago, is a much cringier movie to love. It leans heavily into the 2000s hallmarks of whimsical white womanhood; Margot (Michelle Williams) orders a glass of milk in quirky inexplicability on the plane where she first connects with her neighbor and soon-to-be-lover, Daniel (Luke Kirby). She’s just been pushed through the airport in a wheelchair despite being able to walk—when he calls her out for lying about a fatigue condition, she explains her fear of “being in between things.” It’s a lot. But as the pair end up at their homes across the street from each other, and she resumes a life of almost too-easy companionship with her husband, Lou (Seth Rogen), the film gorgeously explores malaise and the fixity of adult lives through the longing between Margot and Daniel.

Betweenness is written all over Past Lives’ opening sequence, too. As Hae Sung, Nora, and Arthur sit together at a bar counter, a pair offscreen wonders about how they know each other. As they speculate, the camera zooms into Nora’s face. She stares into the lens from the messy middle.

Past Lives and Take This Waltz resonate with me as they do because they wade into relationships’ tensions and contradictions without writing viewers any prescriptions. Not coincidentally, they’re also both films by women writer-directors, Celine Song and Sarah Polley. They share deep attention to every relationship; reverence for public transit; scores where the music melts into each scene; the all-important act of walking away tearfully; Leonard Cohen songs; and especially, curiosity about that sign-posted intersection of who we were and who we might be, where something like who we are waits to walk across. Neither movie is about the triumph of one relationship. The real story is the quietudes of Nora and Margot’s open, conflicted hearts.

Margot’s fear of liminality makes Take This Waltz the choicier film. She and Daniel spend the weeks after they meet in touchless thrall to each other, and that’s of course the most intimate thing in the world. He walks quietly feet behind her the whole way down the street as evening turns to night; diving like merpeople, they twist past one another suspended in blue chlorine; while barely drinking “irrelevant” martinis in cafe daylight, they talk through everything he’d do to her if he could, his cheek resting in his open palm like it all troubles him a little.

She eventually leaves her husband for him. We watch the breakup, Lou’s babbling reckoning and Margot’s comforting and then finally the moment where, sitting on the back porch, he tells her “go” and she does. As she revs into a glorious cinematic run to the nearby lake, I wondered, will the movie end here? She sits a few seconds before the water’s wash of possibility—in another movie, its own kind of ending—when Daniel says, “There you are.” She turns back toward the camera, almost beatific with what looks like relief. She’s found herself belonging, again, to someone else.

Then begins a sequence that made me scream. In an empty apartment, the pair approach one another as Leonard Cohen’s “Take This Waltz” plays. They kiss, and the camera orbits them—this is fucking theater. A mattress emerges, and Margot and Daniel have sex. The spinning room blossoms in reply. Lights, furniture. They’re entangled in new ways, shedding different clothing. They have two threesomes. Then the bed disappears—a living room is at the center. Their movement becomes less frenetic. They watch television on the couch.

The titular Cohen is the perfect song to spin alongside this sequence—at once sexy and full of resignation. I take this waltz, he croons, a refrain straddling romance and the “ay, ay, ay” of someone shaking their head. There’s little said here about this particular waltz between Margot and Daniel—the dance being chronicled is a life’s decisions, and their discontents.

Watching this progression, I feel the way I do sometimes in my old new apartment, gazing at the walls I’d like to decorate better, no more racing heartbeat of novelty to score all things. What’s behind me is so rosy: the bumpy ribbon of gravel we’d walk to our old place up north, ringed with swaying trees; the bad G&Ts at the bar on the corner beside the college roommates who may as well have been family members; the unspeakably cold amber water my parents and brother and I splashed through on slimy New York summer mornings, before the heat hits its fever pitch. From all those lives, I have photos. I have phone calls. I’m technically a plane or train away.

But in the quiet of the place I imagined would be so different, I still find only myself. As the dust settles, it’s easy to feel that yearning to pull up the roots with both hands. 

Nora does not smash up her life for her childhood love (“Do you know me? I’m not gonna miss my rehearsals for some dude”). Over the two minutes Hae Sung’s Uber to the airport takes to arrive, they shift to face each other in silence, standing a foot apart and gazing wholly at one another with such gravity you feel they could literally fall together, drawn by an unseen hand. You wonder if they will, and what you yourself want. Don’t do it—no, do.

The Uber comes. When Hae Sung loads in his baggage, turns and says, “Hey,” we flash back to their goodbye as children, now lit with this 5 a.m. darkness. On the street in New York, he wonders if they’re already something more to each other in the next life—if this is a past life, too.

After their goodbye, Nora walks back to her apartment in measured strides on thudding feet, like someone adjusting to the atmosphere. She used to be a crybaby. It’s a childhood side of her which her husband never saw, one she references jokingly with Hae Sung throughout the film. As she reaches her apartment, her face falls into sobs. Arthur rushes down the stairs to open the gate and hold the moment’s weight, the weight of these two relationships, with her. They climb the steps in tandem. It always makes me cry.

Take This Waltz also refutes the narrative shape I expected, unspooling past the apartment’s whirlwind into the next months of Margot’s life. When her ex-husband’s sister has relapsed and disappeared on a bender, his family calls Margot back to her old home to comfort the sister’s small daughter. When his sister (Sarah Silverman) arrives, hitting the neighbor’s trash cans with her car, she wants to talk to Margot, who had been her friend. She sees Margot’s disappearance into a new life as its own regression into old habits. “What a fucking obvious move,” she chastises. “You think that everything can be worked out if you just make the right move? That must be thrilling.”

Thrilling, indeed.

When my partner’s friend had just gotten engaged, he and I took a walk one night where conversation turned to our own somewhat open question of marriage. While we’ve been together a long time compared to many people our age, we’ve taken the idea of getting married more as fodder for April Fool’s pranks on our friends than something to seriously consider. We reject it in this kneejerk way, I think, because of being little lefty jerks who want to be too cool for vows. But on some level, we also don’t want to contend with the commitment’s seeming permanence. There’s a reason Take This Waltz and Past Lives tell stories of married couples. It’s harder to make a different move after legal agreements and white dresses.

Yet here we find ourselves, across the country, totally smitten with our cat, and splitting the rent. It’d be no easier, truly, to walk back from our lives. We’re living them with each other.

I worried that I would accidentally imply something horrible about my relationship in writing about these movies, bound as they are in the age-old questions of which guy you should or could be with. But watching these films doesn’t really make me want to litigate our love. I think more about lives un-lived. I think back to the onset of COVID-19, a distinct moment in which the present unstuck itself from what was supposed to happen. So many trivial things didn’t come to be: the weekend trip he and I had planned to Montreal, the summer job I was meant to start at a children’s art camp, that fall performance my mom and I had been counting down the days to which never returned to the stage.

One night in the early pandemic, he and I sat in a hushed dark kitchen and made grilled cheeses for a late-night dinner, and I burst wholly into tears. I’ve never been able to really explain that moment—as is so often my excuse for feeling an emotion, I think I was just quite tired. But I think, too, that I felt the fresh loss of all those other possibilities, the cleaving of life another way. I’ve sometimes described the windy twists of the subsequent years as a process of “clawing my way back to myself.” But I think what I felt, crying on my sandwich, was that the journey would be messier even than that phrase evokes. I was becoming a different person than I would have been. There would not be a going back.

Take This Waltz has another scene that feels microcosmic for the greater arc of a relationship. Margot and Daniel board a ride called the Scrambler together. Inside a nondescript warehouse, the lights go down, everything sparkles pink and silver and “Video Killed the Radio Star” plays as the tiny car starts to turn. The pair begin with their hands thrown in the air, yelling almost jokingly; whipped about by the machine’s inertia, they drift lustfully toward and away from one another on their metal seat; then their eye contact becomes frightened, confused; they both begin to look around and into space; things ramp up again, and she’s whipping her hair around and laughing. But the house lights blare back on and the music cuts, jolting back into a reality where both their faces read washed out and profoundly uncomfortable. 

But here’s the best part: after saying goodbye to Lou, post-sisterly confrontation, Margot boards the Scrambler again, alone. With her eyes closed, she flows inside the coaster. Riding the wave of the song’s bridge (“You aaaaare a radio staaaaar”), her face takes on an imperfect serenity. The film ends mid-spin.

Past Lives closes not with Nora’s tears, but with another solo ride: Hae Sung’s cab crossing the bridge to take him home as the sun begins its gentle rise. Hours earlier, alone together and with “You Know More Than I Know” playing, for lack of a better word, knowingly in the bar, Arthur told Hae Sung he was glad he came. He said, “It was the right thing to do.”

It’s a funny turn of phrase, one that would usually connote morality. In these movies, though, the rightness comes from facing those moments when all our possible lives feel palpable and tangible in our hands. Watching and rewatching these films has felt like looking, properly and deeply, at all that’s passing before me—the way you do when everything’s changing. Recognizing so much in the strange shapes of their stories, now this, I think. Now this.

Kate Fishman writes about ecology and the arts. Her work has appeared in publications including Atmos, Sierra, and Rainbow Rodeo, and she produces an amateur conversation podcast about loneliness and belonging. She’s on Twitter @katefishreports.