Past Lives in the Cinema: The Film’s Moving End Explained by the Director

Warning – The article below contains spoilers as it goes back to the end of Past Lives – Nos vies d’avant. So please continue if you haven’t seen a Celine Song movie.

After going through the Berlin and Deauville festivals, Past Lives is one of the most beautiful films of 2023. Also one of the most mobile. And that’s largely due to its absolutely heartbreaking final scene, which ends the long-running story between Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yeo).

Two childhood friends who were separated by life before their love was revealed when he left his native Korea to live in the United States. Their reunion, twelve and twenty-four years later, allows the feature film to explore notions of past lives, missed opportunities, and what could have been.

So many themes that find their climax in a long silence between the two main characters while Hae Sun waits for the taxi that will take him to Korea. And maybe get him out of Nora’s life. But how can we interpret the final and unspoken exchange between them? Answer with the director and screenwriter.

“People often talk about this movie as the story of a missed date”Celine Song tells us at the Deauville American Film Festival. “Which is very true, and I think about it a lot. But what I’m most interested in, especially at the end, is that he gets to say goodbye to the little girl he left years ago. She’s twenty-four. Past Life is a movie about three goodbyes.”

Past Lives is a movie about three goodbyes

“The first time when they were kids, which was too bad because they were too young to do it right. The second time, they hurt each other. It’s a very sad and heartbreaking breakup, and a little weird because it does that. Video on Skype.”

“And there’s a final goodbye, it’s a goodbye. The one that brings us to the end of the movie. And it’s special that he has to decide that goodbye, which they couldn’t do twenty-four. Years ago. That’s why there’s a flashback during that scene.”

“And, if you look closely, this flashback takes place in the dark, at night. So it’s not the same time of day or the same lighting as when they said goodbye as children. It is the same light as the present moment. It means that these two children have been waiting to say goodbye on this street corner for twenty-four years, and that’s what’s most important to me: that Nora is able to bury the part of herself that she couldn’t bury. to say goodbye.”

“Hae Sung’s gift of coming to New York is to remind him that this little girl really existed and that she never got a proper goodbye. But thanks to this gift, they can say a proper goodbye. And Arthur gets something extraordinary, too, because he sees her cry and I never had the chance. Hae Sung gave them this beautiful gift, but he also came because he wanted to close the door.

“She needed to come and close the door on everything she thought could happen. It’s really about closing herself. So when Nora cries on the way home, she’s doing it because of this little girl. The daughter she left behind. She doesn’t. To cry because she’s not going to end up with Hae Sung: she’s doing what she didn’t do when she emigrated, because then crying didn’t seem important to her.”

Comments collected by Maximilien Pierret in Deauville on September 2, 2023