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Celine Song (South Korea, 1988), raised in Canada, first became a playwright in New York and then debuted as a filmmaker with Past Lives (2023), a delicate philosophical love story which is not really a love story, just a meditation on fate, shot by Shabier Kirchner in New York.
The film opens with two unseen people, a man and a woman, trying to guess who
three other people are, seen chatting casually in a club at 4am: a Korean man,
a Korean woman and a White guy.
Then the film rewinds to 24 years earlier, when the two Koreans were children
growing up together in Korea.
The girl, Na Young, has an older sister. Her mom is an artist and her father is a film director. THey are planning to move to Canada.
The boy, Hae Sung, is her classmate.
Na Young is convinced that she will marry Hae Sung.
They like each other and their mothers take them to play together in a park.
But then Na tells her classmates that she's leaving and the two kids part.
The two sisters adopt the names Nora and Michelle.
Twelve years later Hae Sung is drafted in the military.
Nora is now a young independent woman in New York.
One day Nora is checking out old friends on
Facebook and finds out that Hae Sung has been looking for connecting with her,
except that she has changed name.
She messages him and he is happy to hear from her.
She is a playwright, he is still in college.
Hae Sung confesses that he missed her all the time. She is flattered.
They keep chatting over the Internet when she moves to a one-month
artist residency. Hae Sung doesn't know English and he is moving to China to
learn Mandarin.
They are almost falling in love again but he cannot travel to New York for at least one year and she can't visit Korea for at least one year due to her a
literary ambitions.
She decides that it is better if they don't communicate for a while.
Nora falls in love with white guy Arthur, also a writer, who is also attending the artist residency, and Hae Sung gets a girlfriend in China.
Nora and Arthur discuss the Korean belief that they must have known each other in thousands of past lives.
Twelve years later Arthur and Nora are married in New York, each with a writing career, renting a humble apartment.
Hae Sung is back in Korea, has broken up with his girlfriend and has decided to travel to New York, even knowing that Nora is married.
And so they finally meet in person. She tells her husband Arthur, who ponders that her story with Hae Sung is much more romantic than the story between them, Arthur and Nora. Arthur and Nora married out of convenience, being in the same line of business, needing to share an apartment and she needing a green card.
Nora introduces Hae Sung to Arthur. They go to the club of the first scene,
where the conversation mostly happens in Korean between Hae Sung and Nora.
Hae Sung becomes melancholy.
Hae Sung realizes that he loved Nora because she was precisely the ambitious person who could not live in Korea. They discuss what they were in past lives.
She fatalistically accepts her fate.
Arthur accepts to be just a spectator as they chat in Korean.
Hae Sung leaves for the airport. Nora walks outside with him.
They stare at each other a long time as if she was waiting for him to kiss her,
but he doesn't. He has a flashback to the last time they saw each other in Korea when they were children. Hae Sung asks her about the next life. Nora doesn't
know what to say.
Hae Sung bids farewell telling her "See you then."
Nora walks back towards the house. Arthur meets her outside and she cries into his arms.
Materialists (2025)
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