The ONE That GOT AWAY

In Celine Song’s debut feature, Past Lives, there are two love interests and no easy choices.

- Mallika Rao

PAST LIVES is in theaters June 2.

“IT WAS THE WAY people were looking at us.” In a bright corner of Café Mogador in the East Village, the filmmaker Celine Song is remembering the rendezvous at a nearby bar five years ago that inspired her debut film, Past Lives. On paper, the movie is a love triangle formed by Nora (Greta Lee), a Korean Canadian playwright in New York; her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who resurfaces in adulthood; and Nora’s husband. Nora and Hae Sung knew each other as kids in Seoul, where Nora went by Na Young, before she emigrated westward with her family. Now an engineer, Hae Sung crosses the world to see her, and they embark on long walks that are rich with tender, curious glances and slow revelations. But Nora has married a Jewish American writer named Arthur (John Magaro). In the opening scene, she sits between the two men in the Hopper-esque amber light of a bar. She is turned gently toward Hae Sung, engaging him in conversation in Korean as she swishes her drink, while Arthur, to her left, exudes a hangdog air.

In real life, Song found herself at Please Don’t Tell, a Manhattan speakeasy. The two men she sat between were an old sweetheart, an engineer in business casual from Korea whose name she prefers not to share, and her white husband, the writer Justin Kuritzkes, wearing some “shitty shirt.” She felt the eyes of patrons on them and imagined their thoughts. Which one is the husband? Is he jealous? She felt any quick answer to the deeper implicit question—Who are they to one another?—would lack the intricacy of the truth. “You can feel the desire to know,” she says. “And if I’m gonna tell you, I’m gonna tell you for real.”