When writer-director Celine Song introduced herself to audiences with her first feature film this year, she made it a very personal introduction.
Song’s film Past Lives, released by A24 in June following its Sundance Film Festival premiere, is both fictional and autobiographical. The protagonist Nora, played by Greta Lee, is not named “Celine,” but the fictional character and the director share key experiences. The opening moments of the film, in which Nora is sitting in a New York bar flanked by her English-speaking husband and her childhood love from Korea, comes directly from Song’s own experience. “Sitting there, I felt very empowered, or I felt something special was passing through the three of us,” Song told Vanity Fair earlier this year about that real-life moment.
Song calls Past Lives “an inspired bio and adaptation of what it’s been like to be myself,” and she’s far from the first director to essentially adapt her life story to the screen. In 1959, François Truffaut released The 400 Blows, which has become a key reference for so many films that have come since, Past Lives included. “Few movies have been so personal,” the great critic J. Hoberman once wrote of The 400 Blows, calling it “likely the first openly autobiographical commercial feature.”
Truffaut, like Song, made his first feature as an attempt to wrestle with his own history, in his case a home life full of rejection leading to disaffection. The film also offers a broader thematic statement about the whims of an unmoored childhood and provides Truffaut a platform for the visual language that would come to define the French New Wave. More than 60 years later, and with so many other autobiographical films that have followed The 400 Blows example, Past Lives also feels new in so many ways. Song’s voice is fresh and unmistakably hers, as is the way the movie presents a portrait of a young woman caught between the life she crafted for herself in New York and the existence she could have had if her parents had never left her home country. Past Lives comes from Song’s personal past, but also takes its place in a filmmaking tradition that shows no signs of slowing down.
Plenty of directors decades into their careers can feel inspired to reintroduce themselves by revisiting the past, from Federico Fellini’s Amarcord in 1973 to Spike Lee’s Crooklyn in 1994 to the recent Oscar-friendly efforts from Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans), Kenneth Branagh (Belfast), and Alfonso Cuarón (Roma), among others. But the autobiographical debut—or, at least, a defining early film that introduces a director to audiences—has a particular power to blur the lines between art and life. When he made 1973’s Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese said it was “an attempt to put myself and my old friends on the screen, to show how we lived, what life was like in Little Italy. It was really an anthropological or a sociological tract.” Scorsese would go on to executive produce Joanna Hogg’s two The Souvenir films which, like the Antoine Doinel series that followed The 400 Blows, offer the unlikely combination of autobiography and franchise.