Under the Spotlight: Greta Lee’s heartbreaking performance in ‘Past Lives’
With Celine Song’s directorial debutPast Lives, cinema fans were treated to one of the best romantic dramas of all time, a beautifully tender and reflective tale of fate, missed connections and the age-old question of “what might have been”. Starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro, the A24-produced film served as a heartbreaking meditation on the ever-confusing nature of love and childhood and audiences across the world wept tears in abundance.
Song regales the story of two South Korean childhood friends, Na Young (Lee) and Hae Sung (Yoo), who develop a romantic connection with one another at the age of 12. However, their union is broken when Na Young emigrates with her family to Canada, leaving Hae Sung toalways question what might have happened between them should fate have played a kinder hand.
A dozen years pass, and Na Young (now going by the name Nora) moves to New York City to seek her fortune as a writer while Hae Sung serves his compulsory military service in Korea. The bond of years gone by remains strong, though, and the two initially reconnect online before Nora decides that she wants to focus on her career, again leaving Hae Sung to ruminate on their potential relationship alone.
It’s not long before Nora meets a fellow author, Arthur, at a writing retreat, and after another 12 years, the pair marry. The past lives that might have been still bubble under the surface, though, and Hae Sung journeys to New York to meet Nora, who herself has begun to question whether Hae Sung has been the right person for her all along. Arthur, too, touchingly wonders whether he has invariably become the villain in the “perfect love story”, an obstacle for Nora to overcome, rather than a husband to eternally love.
Nora is expertly and tenderly portrayed by the fiercely talented Lee, who gives the performance of a lifetime. After making her start in acting in the theatre, following up with appearances in the Netflix comedy-dramaRussian Dolland the Apple TV+ dramaThe Morning Show, Lee landed the lead role in Song’s directorial debut, an opportunity she undoubtedly took in both hands, delivering one of the most heartwrenching performances in recent memory.
The ability to speak in Korean as a result of having Korean immigrant parents got the Los Angeles-born Lee off to a brilliant start. Nora’s conversations with Hae Sung possess the kind of formality expected of interpersonal East Asian relationships, one that bubbles into a more personable and intimate feel once the initial connection has been made.
By the same token, Lee is able to depict a change in Nora in becoming Western, firstly Canadian and then American and New York-like. There’s humour and sincerity in her dialogue with Arthur that seems to be lacking with Hae Sung, despite their ongoing history and clear respect for one another. This makes audiences question, such as Nora herself does, just who is the right person for her to continue her romantic journey with – or, more pertinently, and in line with the overall message of the film, whether there is ever any single right person or any one right path for us all to traverse.
Nora’s moments with Arthur in bed, perfectly portrayed by Lee, as they philosophically ruminate on the nature of love and destiny, are touching, to say the least. These scenes capture the intensity and honesty that most of us dream of experiencing with another while there’s respect and love that bubble far beneath her surface that Nora seems to feel for her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung.
Lee was faced with the prospect of conveying the difficulty of choice and the turbulent reality of the human heart and matched up to the task in every way conceivable. After all, it seems to be Nora who must decide what to do in the given scenario: whether to risk her relationship with Arthur to pursue a romantic ideal, a mere fluttering of heart and mind, or to sacrifice that foolish and uncertain fantasy by breaking her husband’s heart.
The most heartwrenching moments of the film towards its culmination see Nora practically on the verge of breakdown, times where her very being is threatened by romance and all its dangerous and simultaneously alluring qualities, and Lee delivers them with the grace and intensity of a master actor at work. A movie is little if nothing without its performers, and with Lee at the head of the table ofPast Lives, Song’s movie is made with an attention to detail and storytelling that is often starkly missing from so many contemporary romantic dramas, and her performance is largely what makes it the masterpiece work of cinema that it undoubtedly is.
Check out the trailer forPast Livesbelow.