{"id":434,"date":"2026-09-23T03:31:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T03:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/?p=434"},"modified":"2026-09-23T03:31:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T03:31:12","slug":"past-lives-2023-theres-something-missing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/pt\/past-lives-2023-theres-something-missing\/","title":{"rendered":"Vidas Passadas (2023) \u2014 Tem Alguma Coisa Faltando"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), Nora (Greta Lee), and Arthur (John Magaro) meeting at a bar in Celine Song\u2019s Past Lives.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

[This is a critique I wrote for my film degree capstone project, a film essay magazine called Close Up<\/em>, which no longer exists. Despite its name, Close Up was a magazine written in brazilian portuguese, so I advise that if you know portuguese, you click the little brazilian flag to read this in its original language. Carrying my usual personal writing, this critique was written around May 2025, while I was reflecting on a breakup.]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A year ago, life came to me in many different forms, eternal in their brevity. My long journeys to college began to take on different colors. I developed panic attacks, trapped inside a bus with no stops for two hours in Rio\u2019s traffic. As a recurring theme in my life, I felt anxious whenever I found myself in a situation whose ending I could not dictate; there was no way to leave that bus once it was already moving. During that time, I changed my route. Instead of one bus, I now took two and a BRT. It took me a little longer to get to college, but the route now had many stops and there was no traffic at all. Besides, it was a beautiful route. I listened to a few artists along the way; most of them were people with guitars and solitary voices. I felt very happy on this new route.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year, while I was talking about how much I looked forward, on the day before class, to the journey to college, a friend reminded me of that time. He reminded me that there had been days when the journey was the worst part, days when their heads dictated the anxieties of the rest of their bodies. Today, it is my favorite part of the day, most of the time. The bus I take passes, around six-thirty, by a beach on the Island where I live. I always take the greatest care possible to choose the perfect songs to play as soon as the beach approaches. I look at the trees around me and the pink sky and the people waking up, and I can never hide a smile because some trees are simply too beautiful and the sky always looks like a painting. I take my transportation seated and always by the window, because I can dream better that way. I look through the window, hypnotized by being in the presence of the greatest beauty of all, which is watching the world bloom in the slow light of morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, and this is what I told my friend, it is not the same as it was a year ago. It is another beauty, and it is a beautiful beauty, but at that moment it was occupied by other eyes that could see it. I like to say that my world dressed itself differently, the way clouds wear the yellow of the sky in what seem to be divine brushstrokes. I used to see this beauty differently, and now the sky, pink or yellow, and the clouds and the beach and the trees… All of them die incomplete in my day. There is something missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout Past Lives<\/em>, Celine Song\u2019s 2023 film, we see characters observing the outside world and its landscapes through windows, as the most striking parallel between the child Hae Sung holding Nora\u2019s hand at the beginning of the film and the same Hae Sung, now an adult, reflecting on his encounter with her in the film\u2019s final scene. Nora herself, as an adult, is introduced through a scene \u2014 entirely indoors, unlike Hae Sung\u2019s \u2014 in which she also looks through a car window while thinking. The subtlety with which the screenplay, the acting, and the direction demand and express themselves allows us to believe in the existence of a dense and complicated private universe inside the head of each main character, where their thoughts are speculated upon by the spectator, who watches from the outside and tries to decipher what is happening in there; while they look from inside their windows toward the outside, the film provokes us to look from the outside in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing makes this more evident than the film\u2019s first scene, where we see Hae Sung, Nora, and Arthur at a bar table, talking among themselves, while a couple at a nearby table tries to understand what the relationship between the three people sitting there might be. If they say that \u201cevery poem teaches you how to interpret it,\u201d the film, at its first instance, makes you familiar with the very process through which it wants you to understand it. The distant view of something so intimate and close. The troubled and indecipherable minds of those involved. The meticulous reading of the details of their movements, as if they could tell a story that the words of a screenplay could never reach. Through the distance we take from the complications throughout the film, there is enough space for them to implode in front of us, while we try to understand the characters through what they do not say. There is something missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Hae Sung does not say is enough for another hour of film, but his connection with Nora is also created through the spaces within her where he resides and expands, spaces found in her smallest words. They possess a connection that always brings Nora back to a side of herself she can no longer reach (\u201cThe Na Young you knew doesn\u2019t exist here\u201d), but which it is impossible to move away from; her Korean side, her inner child. He calls her by a name no one else calls her, one that belongs to her old Korean name. He speaks to her in a language that, as Arthur notices, she practically only uses in her dreams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the beginning, already twelve years removed from both of their childhoods, this was enough for her to live and lie beneath a sunset that had not been part of her life for a long time. She makes time in her day, waking up much earlier, so that she can talk to him. He, in turn, takes her places, including on a cable car overlooking the landscape of Seoul. The connection falls apart at the moment she wishes to be clearer with him, the film\u2019s way of answering that some windows, perhaps, are not meant to be seen from such a distance, because the experience would not be the same. You can see the same landscape as the other person, the beautiful beauty of a Sun going to sleep, but there is something missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Nora breaks their connection, Hae Sung gives up on sending her a text after seeing a couple talking and laughing on the subway. He seems, at that moment, to perceive the space of what was missing in what he wanted to build with Nora. The two of them abandon each other completely. Nora has no interest in holding on to something she had already abandoned before, her Korean life, at the expense of damaging her American life. Hae Sung, after finally finding and spending some time talking to someone he had always wanted to be in contact with, has to abandon the idea that Nora was what was missing from his incomplete being. To understand that there will always be something missing, but that human beings still do not have wings to fly or gills to swim. You can build an airplane to go into the skies or a submarine to reach the bottom of the ocean, but they will only be more windows through which you look from inside. There is something missing. It will not be a flight like that of a bird or a swim like that of a fish. Hae Sung will, in this way, remain eternally incomplete, and will have to imagine himself satisfied with this1<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A microphone invades the dense space between Hae Sung and Nora.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We arrive, then, at Arthur, Nora\u2019s romantic partner. It is interesting to understand the way he is introduced; for instance, while we have the child Nora, still living in Seoul, saying that she likes Hae Sung because he is \u201cmasculine,\u201d one of Arthur\u2019s first scenes with Nora has him lying in bed with her, while both are in positions that, if we follow gender stereotypes, are \u201creversed\u201d; she is lying straight and stroking Arthur\u2019s hair while he is in the spooning position2<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arthur does not conform to the stereotypes of a masculine man, but New York Nora does not care about this. However, she comments on Hae Sung\u2019s masculinity again, this time to Arthur, after she first meets Hae Sung as an adult. More and more, the image of Hae Sung in Arthur\u2019s mind becomes that of someone with whom Nora has a much greater connection than the two of them possess, even while married.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This leads us to the scene of Arthur and Nora in bed, where he opens himself up moderately so that she can understand what bothers him about Hae Sung. When Arthur says that he \u201cwould be the evil white husband\u201d in their story, the scene becomes necessary to invoke the sympathy Celine wants the audience to have for Arthur, an audience that is supposed to find him guilty of something, somehow. He is the stone in the middle of the road for the story the audience wants to see, and the discourse of this potential audience is made exact in his words in bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He then comments on how they met. He implies that he is only with her because he got there first. He simply found her while she was single, the two of them coincidentally lived in the same place, and the connection happened. The truth is that Arthur is right. But the funny part is that almost every connection in the world is made by people who \u201cgot there first.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking at possible possibilities with hypothetical people is utterly irrelevant to the present if the love between the two of them truly exists. If there is not merely a luxury in Nora\u2019s refusal to lose Arthur, but something that the two of them built which makes her want to keep him close. As Hae Sung later says, \u201cTo Arthur, you are someone who stays.\u201d She cannot have him merely because she does not want to leave again; she truly loves him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Extended thoughts of different kinds of qualities are too wandering, but not having them is inconceivable for some people. \u201cWhat would have happened if I hadn\u2019t answered that message?\u201d \u201cWhat would have happened if I hadn\u2019t met that person that day?\u201d Well, someone else would have appeared. Someone else would have gotten there first. But then, how can you know? How can you feel that there is something missing, then? A person who should be there and was replaced?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is an irrelevant thought, like feeling that you are forgetting something as soon as you leave the house, even though you know you are not. Certainty is something impossible to have in life about anything, but the film presents us with the concept of the security of a love; Nora loves Arthur, and that is all that matters, as she tells him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nora denies the existence of an In-Yun<\/em> between herself and Arthur when the two meet, but confirms that she has one with him to Hae Sung during their last encounter at the bar. The \u201cright\u201d love did not become enough simply because it got there first, but because of everything it did to fill the space of time between its beginning and the present. If we deny love until the \u201cright person\u201d appears, we will be as lost about what to do with that beautiful present as we might be about losing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is Arthur, then, the \u201cright person\u201d? You can imagine them dying together fifty years later or separating a few months after the events of the film. It does not matter. The two of them had their time together. But what does this make Hae Sung? Perhaps unlucky. But he is no more incomplete than the other two characters. For everyone, there will always be something missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Arthur emerges, occupying an empty space in the frame that seems to have been made for him.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But what does this make Nora? For her, what she does not say seems to have difficulty containing itself entirely within her. Hae Sung, before the boat ride \u2014 one that Nora never took Arthur on \u2014 reminds her of her childhood dream of winning a Nobel. She says she does not know which award she would want nowadays. Again, Hae Sung brings her toward a much more complete version of who she used to be, pulling her toward having a dream again, while Arthur moves her toward living married life as two people complementing one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nora\u2019s gaze, her smile falling apart as she realizes her confused mind; her gestures are a thousand words. Hae Sung comments twice, on two different days, that she is too young to already have a husband, and both times she seems somewhat uncertain, even defensive about it. We see a Nora somewhat more conflicted than she was the night before, with Arthur in bed. She does not seem very different from who she was in 2012 when she speaks to Hae Sung, while she seems like another person with Arthur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, who is the real Nora? It would be, I think, the one who exists at a distance from both of them, the one who inhabits and screams inside her mind when she seems to be thinking too much. The Nora who is incomplete alone, not the one who is incomplete accompanied. The Nora who speaks Korean in her dreams, but also the one who writes her books and expresses herself artistically in English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is impossible to continue talking about Past Lives<\/em> without mentioning David Lean\u2019s Brief Encounter<\/em> (1945), adapted from No\u00ebl Coward\u2019s play. Films with Celine\u2019s structure always strike notes close to No\u00ebl\u2019s, with the impossible couple and the complications of incompleteness. But the parallels become closer in Hae Sung\u2019s final scene with Nora, where they wait for his Uber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nora walks Hae Sung to the pickup point. They fill themselves with silence and, little by little, look at each other and smile. Nora initially seems not to want to hold his gaze, wanting to leave with her eyes as soon as possible. Hae Sung fixes his eyes on her, wanting to stay. He slowly turns, little by little, leaving his suitcase behind and forcing her to be in the same place as him, now truly; the indecipherable and unspoken thoughts running through both of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a brief moment, they feel an eternal goodbye. They have to abandon each other, against the instinct to complete one another, finally. The tension breaks when the Uber arrives, and Hae Sung leaves. Nora has a long walk back to Arthur, who could not wait inside the house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nora collapses into Arthur, finally allowing herself to feel her suffering. When Arthur embraces her, the comparison to No\u00ebl\u2019s film is almost exact. We can almost imagine Arthur saying to her, in his arms and coming down from the heights she has just experienced, \u201cYou\u2019ve been away for a long time. Thank you for coming back to me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In No\u00ebl, Alec says goodbye to Laura at the train station while apologizing. He apologizes for having met her, for having loved her, for having caused her so much suffering. She tells him that she forgives him if he forgives her in return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Celine, Hae Sung does not let Nora apologize for anything. There is nothing to apologize for. No\u00ebl makes Alec and Laura\u2019s final encounter interrupted, practically incomplete. Celine makes Hae Sung and Na Young\u2019s final encounter seem eternal, one of the fullest vacuums the film provides. Interrupted and incomplete, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When they meet as adults for the first time, after Hae Sung\u2019s long period of shock, she breaks the distance created between them with an embrace. In their departure, it is his turn, because she is the one who remains still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hae Sung is an awkward tourist not only in New York, but also in Nora\u2019s life.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With Past Lives<\/em>, Celine Song continuously reflects upon the concept of In-Yun<\/em>. What would Hae Sung and Nora be in their past lives? What would Hae Sung and Arthur be in their past lives? What would Hae Sung and Nora be in future lives? For Celine, it is essential that we do not know, but that we think about the possibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the distance of the screen, which is a window, we perform the exercise of the couple at the beginning of the film. This time, we search for an answer to silly questions, about possibilities that extend beyond life and beyond what is seen on the screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it is interesting. All the thoughts I develop while looking at the trees on my bus ride. There are so many things I tell myself that I do not believe, but I know must be right. Perhaps I believe them, but I do not want to accept them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, looking through the window, I think about some things I do not always say. I think about a possible life, extensive and incomplete together, in the future. I think about sending a message. I think about it all the time. What I tell myself to stop myself, I do not believe, but it must be right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But do I need to be absolute? Do I need to be right all the time? Can I not be happy for a moment, again, if I decide to be a little wrong?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do not know, and every day I know less. But I believe that what Celine shows through Hae Sung is the attempt to embody someone who would not be bothered by this. Someone who lives uncertainly and with something missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How does one live like that? Would one not like to be a little wrong, not to be satisfied with what one silently imagines? I do not know, and I do not know if I would know in a thousand years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the fantastical is complete, while reality is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let us hold on to the idea that Nora and Hae Sung had their happy ending in another life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this one, there is something missing.<\/p>\n\n\n

  1. \u2014 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus<\/em>. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li>
  2. \u2014 Editor\u2019s note:<\/strong> The author of this text felt it important to state that he also loves this position. \u21a9\ufe0e<\/a><\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n
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    \n\t\t\t\t\t\tAssinar<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    [This is a critique I wrote for my film degree capstone project, a film essay magazine called Close Up, which no longer exists. Despite its name, Close Up was a magazine written in brazilian portuguese, so I advise that if you know portuguese, you click the little brazilian flag to read this in its original […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":439,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"film-divago","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"[{\"content\":\"\u2014 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus<\/em>.\",\"id\":\"3ad11e3c-6fc4-48b2-85cb-259864cfa665\"},{\"content\":\"\u2014 Editor\u2019s note:<\/strong> The author of this text felt it important to state that he also loves this position.\",\"id\":\"98e78cfa-7195-4ea4-84d9-d0d45ad22162\"}]","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[29,32,34,30,31],"class_list":["post-434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-amateur-critique","tag-celine-song","tag-drama","tag-film-romance","tag-greta-lee","tag-year-2023"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Past-Lives-45.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":447,"href":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions\/447"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-nightporter.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}