Celine Song, director of ‘Past Lives’, explains the importance of silent scenes in cinema

Silence was one of the tools used by Celine Song to compose Past Lives (2023), film starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo It is John Magaro. In the feature film, childhood friends Nora and Hae Sung meet again after years and need to figure out what to do with the passion born as children in adulthood.

“I really believe that a film is a piece of music. So the whole film has to run like a piece of music. A lot of that has to do with pacing,” he said. Song in an interview with Variety. The director and screenwriter is also a playwright: “I’m used to incorporating beats and silences into my own scripts, so all the silences were planned.”

The ease that Nora and Hae Sung had in communicating when they still lived together in South Korea is replaced by the inability to express their feelings verbally. Interpreted by LeeNora has embraced the culture of the country she lives in, the United States, while Hae Sung, lived by Yoois subject to South Korean customs.

There is a level at which this must be uncomfortable. It’s supposed to look like these two people aren’t from the same world — and they aren’t. The way these silences have to work, we need to know what was said before and after. There is no literal language, but there is the language that is happening in their performance, in their faces.