'Everybody on this stage is my in-yun': Golden Globes should follow fate on 'Past Lives'

The first time my husband and I saw "Past Lives" in the theater, we knew afterward we couldn't go home.

We needed a drink. We needed to talk about what we just saw, what we just heard.

Knowing each other as Bob and I do after three decades of marriage, we had expected to be moved by an intimate yet universal movie. What we didn't expect was that as we discussed "Past Lives" in a crowded bar, we couldn't help but cry. Not just a swelling of the throat and wiping a tear or two – full on ugly cry, trying to form words despite broken-voices crying. What must people have thought was happening?

Which is precisely how "Past Lives" opens: The camera approaches a woman sitting between two men at a bar. You hear a voice asking, "Who do you think they are to each other?"

Then the movie takes you back 24 years to Seoul, South Korea. When the film returns at the end to New York City and the present, you now know who these three people are to each other in this life. What happened in between is a lot of "in-yun," a Korean term for fate – perhaps 8,000 layers of connections from their past lives.

And Monday, when the nominees for the Golden Globe Awards are announced, who knows where in-yun might lead the movie's writer-director, Celine Song, and her three main actors, Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro?

'Everybody on this stage is my in-yun'

Song's breathtaking directorial debut, a breakout at the Sundance Film Festival in January and an arthouse hit since its release in June, has already won major honors at the recent Gotham Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards.

With 97% positive reviews on the aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, "Past Lives" also has earned nominations from the Film Independent Spirit Awards.

Accepting her Gotham win for best feature film on Nov. 27, Song said to the cast and crew standing behind her, "Thank you for believing in me when all I had was a script written in two languages. Everybody on this stage is my in-yun."

The 35-year-old has said that the movie was inspired by what happened to her several years ago at the Manhattan speakeasy Please Don't Tell, where she was translating between her Korean childhood sweetheart and her American husband, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes.

Song then wrote a movie about the romantic road not taken, the words unsaid.

'You're my Kim':How I landed a Hollywood movie and a 'Heaven and Earth' family

'You had to leave because you’re you'

Don't judge me that I'm still mad at the leading female character of "Past Lives," Nora Moon, for what she did as a child.

When the movie time travels back, the preteen, knowing that her family's about to emigrate to Canada, goes on a playdate with Hae Sung and never tells the boy – whom she told her mom she'll "probably marry" – that she's abandoning him. He had to overhear the news days later. When a classmate asked why she was moving to the West, the ambitious young writer answered, "Because Koreans don't win the Nobel Prize for literature."

Nobel winner's work helps fight COVID.But her success is a symbol of how bad academic medicine can be at judging scientists’ potential.

I'm mad at Hae Sung, too, for not showing his anger and hurt as they part on different paths. At the fork home, he turns left and she ascends colorful stairs.

In what Nora and Hae Sung didn't say and do lies what could have been. But what their lives become – what used to be their future – is nothing to apologize for. A quarter-century later, Hae Sung the man visiting Nora the married woman in Manhattan finally sees their past clearly, and says what's needed to free their present.

"The truth I learned here is: You had to leave because you’re you. And the reason I liked you is because you’re you," he tells her in Korean. "And who you are is someone who leaves."

We've circled back to the opening scene, and on the other side of Nora at the bar is her husband, who doesn't understand Korean. Hae Sung continues: "To Arthur, you're someone who stays."

Still, Hae Sung and Nora couldn't help but wonder who they were to each other in prior lives. Wistful guesses range from lovers, an unhappily married couple, to "just a bird and the branch it sat on one morning."

My father-in-law has recounted a dream that he and my dad – who died just before I met my future husband – were Catholic monks together in some Italian monastery lifetimes ago. In the dream, he sees himself in a brown robe and homemade sandals, and the two of them are picking olives.  

In this lifetime, my father-in-law was born in Iowa and isn't even religious, and my dad was a Vietnamese humanist. My mom is Buddhist, and to her this dream just adds to evidence that what we do in this life affects our next life, and the next.

Bob and I have now seen this movie with our parents and our children, people with whom according to Buddhism we've had thousands of connections in past lives before reuniting in this reincarnation. By the last scene, there's always tears. Days later, we'd find ourselves still discussing the script, the acting – how words were written and said and how silences and bodies spoke even more.

In "Past Lives," Nora Moon the playwright is not sorry about her ambition, what she wants in this life. In Celine Song's movie, she goes from wanting to win the Nobel to the Pulitzer to the Tony. What about a Golden Globe, or an Oscar?

We'll see where in-yun leads Monday, when Hollywood begins its big nominations and awards season. "See you then."

Thuan Le Elston, a member of USA TODAY's Editorial Board, is the author of "Rendezvous at the Altar: From Vietnam to Virginia."