When Greta Lee learn Celine Song’s script for Past Lives, she was “completely gutted”.
“It sounds dramatic, but it felt like the kind of script that I’d been waiting for my whole life. It was not a casual experience in any way, I was crying, I was astounded. It was a sneak attack,” Lee informed news.com.au.
“And then I didn’t get the part.”
It’s astonishing to suppose there might’ve been a model of Past Lives that didn’t function Lee as Nora, the confidently cool protagonist of Song’s shifting and sleek movie about misplaced love and our former selves.
Past Lives was the hit of Sundance earlier this yr and is presently taking part in at Sydney Film Festival, and also will have a berth on the Melbourne International Film Festival earlier than its common launch in late August.
The film is centred on Nora, a thirtysomething New York author who spent the primary 12 years of her life in Seoul, earlier than migrating to Canada after which ultimately to the US. Before she left South Korea, she had a childhood crush named Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), somebody intrinsically tied to a life and self she left behind.
As adults, Nora and Hae Sung reconnect when he visits New York to see her, besides now she’s married to a white American man, Arthur (John Magaro).
But reasonably than a dramatic love triangle, the romance is simply the framework filmmaker Song makes use of to discover one thing deeper and extra fascinating about how we understand and expertise our lives.
“It’s this other thing that emerges out of what could’ve been just a conventional love story, and I think that’s the thing that stays with you,” Lee stated.
Lee embodies Nora with delicate class in an understated and mature efficiency that’s a step exterior of the largely comedic or heightened roles she’s recognized for, together with Girls, Russian Doll and Morning Wars.
After dropping the half the primary time – “after so many years, you really learn to let go, it’s a survival tactic” – Lee was shocked when a yr later she was requested to Zoom with Song.
She couldn’t imagine it had come again round. One video name, an “intimate” dialog and two scene reads later, she was supplied the position on the spot.
“I have all these selfies of myself screaming and crying,” Lee recalled.
Lee was born in Los Angeles to oldsters who had immigrated from Korea, and like Nora, her first language was Korean. But her expertise is totally different from the character she performs.
“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.
“It was done in such an exquisitely delicate way, where it wasn’t in service of anything. It wasn’t political and it wasn’t serving any sort of gaze or making a palatable explanation of identity.”
Because of that specificity, and her cultural connection to the character and the venture, Lee had by no means felt so uncovered by her work. She stated that the primary time she noticed the completed movie, she requested Song if they might not share Past Lives with the entire world.
It was in jest, in fact, nevertheless it hinted at how affecting making Past Lives was for her.
“Ohmigod, I felt so naked,” she defined. “While I was filming, I joked, ‘I would rather be fully nude than to exist as this version, to show these parts of myself.’
“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.
“To put that on full display, it was agonising. I learnt so much of the painful truth of what my existence is and has been, in telling this story.”
There’s a second in Past Lives during which Nora has to say goodbye to this childhood model of herself she had been holding onto as a “what if”, an unanswered query she’s lastly able to let go.
The emotional strategy of taking part in via that scene hit Lee in a sequence of parallels. She stated she skilled a “certain heartbreak similar to Nora”. For Lee, it was a reckoning, a confrontation with herself over the elements of her personal identification.
“At the end of this, I felt like I was saying goodbye to certain elements of myself. Because the reality is, I don’t speak that much Korean in my day-to-day, even though I’m fluent, even though that was my birth language. That’s the truth of it.
“And realising that is part of my identity, that for myriad reasons it isn’t something that’s front and centre, was hard and heartbreaking to reconcile.”
That Past Lives has so many layers it explores with unimaginable nuance is why the movie is shaping as much as be one of the acclaimed releases thus far this yr.
Taken at floor degree, a film a few lady torn between an outdated flame and her husband might’ve been a really totally different, very melodramatic and really predictable proposition.
But Song’s film is nothing like what you count on.
Lee stated, “It’s mostly a story about decent people doing their very best to behave decently towards each other. And that uncovered so many larger ideas about what is love, what is the human condition?
“And how do we cope with his fact that life is relatively short, and we only really get this one at it, as far as we know.”
Past Lives is screening on the Sydney Film Festival, is a part of the line-up of the Melbourne International Film Festival, and can be launched in cinemas extensively on August 31
Source: www.news.com.au
