It is July and we are at Galway Film Fleadh. Celine Song, director of the enchanting Past Lives, is stopping off on her way home from the prestigious Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, in the Czech Republic. Already a respected theatre-maker in New York City, she encountered a different level of fame when, in January, her debut film premiered to ecstatic responses at Sundance. That roll of acclaim has continued and she is now, in theory, about to run the entertainment industry’s most ruthless gauntlet.
Everyone who knows anything about the Oscars sees Past Lives as a strong contender for best picture. We are speaking just a day before the actors’ strike begins. Awards season is hard work for a director at the best of times, but it may be tougher still when, as is currently the case, your actors are forbidden from carrying out promotional duties. It feels vulgar to even raise the issue. But I imagine the people at A24 – also distributors of Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All at Once – are already giving her pointers.
“The thing I am the most excited about is that, as this movie comes out, globally, we can have this kind of conversation about independent film,” she says diplomatically. “Any kind of conversation that leads to people wanting to come in to watch this movie about a Korean girl is just so wonderful.”
Quite right. The important thing is that this elegantly composed film gets discussed in the right places. Past Lives stars Greta Lee as Nora, a writer in contemporary New York, who, many years after leaving Korea, connects with a childhood pal on Skype. A few years after that, the young man comes to visit her. They wander about the city and make a connection that, though complex and powerful, does not seem to threaten Nora’s relationship with her amiable, tolerant partner.
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One can’t help but wonder about the autobiographical element in this. I read the idea came from a conversation in a bar.
“I was in this bar in the East Village, sitting between my childhood sweetheart – who had become a friend over time, and who was visiting me – and my husband. I was the person who was translating these two. They know such different parts of who I am. I thought they couldn’t possibly know what the other guy knows. We weren’t just talking about anything that significant. It was smalltalk. But I felt like a portal or a grid.”
Song was, indeed, born in South Korea. Her family moved to Canada when she was 12. She studied psychology at Kingston University in Ontario, then playwriting at Columbia University in Manhattan. That sense of being from three places informs the film.
“I think it was important for Nora to be, like myself, twice an immigrant,” she says. “When you emigrated, as a kid, there was always a feeling that you did that against your will. Because your parents did that. What was important for Nora is that she’s a perennial immigrant. She’s someone who, even as a grown-up, is happy to emigrate.”
With that educational background, you will not be surprised to hear, Song is dauntingly intelligent. She is also unpretentious, amiable and enthusiastic, visibly perking up when I express my interest in her lockdown project The Seagull on The Sims 4. Yes, she really did use that video game to stage a version of Anton Chekhov’s celebrated play. There is a nice short film on the project that reveals an astonishingly fresh take on the death of Konstantin.
“It was so fun. It was so wonderful,” she says. “I always felt like The Sims was Chekhovian. Right? It’s about living. It’s about the pain of living. And it’s about getting up and doing something. There was something about the soul of the Sims that is so connected in a funny way to Chekhov. So that’s why I felt that was a fun thing to do.”
It is not an obvious leap from that witty, postmodern exercise to a quiet, ruminative drama like Past Lives. The film is unquestionably cinematic. There have been inevitable comparisons with Richard Linklater’s Before… trilogy. One can also see it as a take on Brief Encounter that, paradoxically, stretches over two decades. But few viewers approaching with no prior knowledge would be surprised to hear a playwright was involved in its creation. It has that containment, that intimacy. So how did it end up as a film?
“Because I feel this particular story needs to be told literally when it comes to time and space,” she says. “The years passing. The ageing of the characters. Us being able to see the contrast between little Nora and Nora as a grown-up. Because it spans decades and continents I felt it needed to be told cinematically. It needed to be seen literally. I wanted the feeling of Seoul – the sound and the colour – to feel different from New York. Those things were a fundamental part of the story.”
Ah, New York. High among the things that set Past Lives apart is its feeling for the scuffed beauty of that city. It is a New York film to compare with The Apartment, Frances Ha, Rear Window or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Nora’s apartment sits in the now achingly voguish, once rough-and-tumble East Village. A shot towards the Brooklyn Bridge at Jane’s Carousel recalls a famous shot of the Queensboro Bridge in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. And the film dares to take Nora and her old pal on a boat trip to the Statue of Liberty. Just like New Yorkers don’t.
“So much of the location just had to be from the point of view of the characters,” she says. “My crew, who were New Yorkers, couldn’t understand why we were going to show the Statue of Liberty.”
Because they hadn’t been?
“No, they hadn’t. Ha ha ha! If it is a big tourist location in your own city it’s hard to imagine the people living there really having a magical feeling about it. But the wonderful thing was the characters are an immigrant and a tourist. For a tourist and an immigrant the Statue of Liberty is a wonderfully romantic place. For an immigrant it’s obviously an amazing symbol.”
In its unassuming way, Past Lives is an experimental film. No sequences descend into avant-garde puppetry or stop-motion surrealism. But Song has taken an impressively original approach to her challenging brief. She kept the two male actors apart until the scene where they meet for the first time. She allowed an entire magazine of film to roll – yes, Past Lives is shot on celluloid – while John Magaro, who plays Nora’s partner, listens to the others talking in a bar. He thus gave her “every kind of listening”.
More intriguing still was her approach to recording the Skype conversations. The use of that technology – an unlikely nostalgia gear – already places those scenes in the recent past. She came up with a fascinating strategy to generate believable irritation at the glitches and freezes that still interrupt such connections.
“Anybody who’s been in a long-distance relationship knows about this,” she says. “You’re, like, am I annoyed at Skype or am I annoyed at this person? That’s what’s really painful about it.”
That sounds about right.
“So what we did was we built two sets, connected them with a cable and put a throttle on the cable. It was really important that they didn’t know when the interference was coming. I was the one who was controlling the interference. They knew the screen would freeze, but they didn’t know when.”
Past Lives could hardly have gone down better at its premiere at Sundance. Vanity Fair called it a “note-perfect directorial debut”. Rolling Stone called it the “first great film of 2023″. The eccentric breed that is the Oscar blogger pencilled it into predictions. Song does say that she remembered the crew being moved on set, but you can never predict what the public will make of such personal material.
“So far the movie had been a bit of a secret that I’d kept. Now it’s going to be shared with the world. There is a feeling of letting go.”
Some part of you wants to keep it to yourself.
“Oh yeah. It would be great if I made it and was, like, ‘Okay, great. Bye!’ Ha ha!”
Past Lives is in cinemas from Thursday, September 7th
