Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/A24
In the opening scene of Past Lives, two patrons at a bar gossip off-screen about a trio of strangers they see sitting across the room. One woman sits, smiley and chipper, as she chats with a man, who is equally enthused about the conversation. Next to them is a dour-looking man, who’s left out of the chat. The people watchers guess that the two chatty folks are perhaps brother and sister, seeing as they’re both Korean, and the other (white) man is her husband. Perhaps they are all friends, and none of them is dating one other. Maybe the white man is the American tour guide of the two Korean tourists.
Either way, the onlookers fixate on the woman. She’s at the center, after all, which thrusts us viewers to also hypothesize about her relationship to these men. Then, as the two unseen narrators quiet down, she looks right at us—the audience. She stares into the camera. That woman is Nora, played by Greta Lee. That moment, in which Nora peers into our souls and invites us into her life-affecting story, is otherworldly yet uncomplicated, loud yet quiet. But Lee says it was harder to film than it looks.
“The guys had to put up with me kicking and screaming underneath the bar, just freaking out, because I felt like I wasn’t getting it in the way that I wanted,” Lee says over Zoom, the perfect medium to chat about a movie that spends a quarter of its time on characters’ Skype calls. The emotion that director Celine Song suggested her look convey wasn’t helpful. “Celine was like, ‘It’s a cosmic joke! Tell a cosmic joke with your eyes.’ Like, gahhh! I don’t know how to do that.”