![]() ![]() Past Lives will be in wide release on August 31. I learnt so much of the painful truth of what my existence is and has been, in telling this story.” “To put that on full display, it was agonising. “It’s acting and I’m playing a character but it’s showing her Korean-ness in a way that I’ve been subconsciously tucking away and keeping private for myself in order to live my life as an American within certain institutions and biases. “While I was filming, I joked, ‘I would rather be fully nude than to exist as this version, to show these parts of myself.’ “Ohmigod, I felt so naked,” she explained. It was in jest, of course, but it hinted at how affecting making Past Lives was for her. She said that the first time she saw the finished film, she asked Song if they could not share Past Lives with the whole world. ![]() It wasn’t political and it wasn’t serving any sort of gaze or making a palatable explanation of identity.”īecause of that specificity, and her cultural connection to the character and the project, Lee had never felt so exposed by her work. “It was done in such an exquisitely delicate way, where it wasn’t in service of anything. “That being said, it was one of the first times I could see a character that was fleshed out in such a way in terms of cultural specificity, and showing, in a brazen yet quiet way, what it is to be an American who’s Asian and living her life. But her experience is different from the character she plays. Lee was born in Los Angeles to parents who had immigrated from Korea, and like Nora, her first language was Korean. ![]() Past Lives explores complex emotions within a simple story. Before she left South Korea, she had a childhood crush named Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), someone intrinsically tied to a life and self she left behind.Īs adults, Nora and Hae Sung reconnect when he visits New York to see her, except now she’s married to a white American man, Arthur (John Magaro). The movie is centred on Nora, a thirtysomething New York writer who spent the first 12 years of her life in Seoul, before migrating to Canada and then eventually to the US. Past Lives was the hit of Sundance earlier this year and is currently playing at Sydney Film Festival, and will also have a berth at the Melbourne International Film Festival before its general release in late August. It’s astonishing to think there could’ve been a version of Past Lives that didn’t feature Lee as Nora, the confidently cool protagonist of Song’s moving and graceful film about lost love and our former selves. It was not a casual experience in any way, I was crying, I was astounded. “It sounds dramatic, but it felt like the kind of script that I’d been waiting for my whole life. When Greta Lee read Celine Song’s script for Past Lives, she was “completely gutted”. ![]()
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