There Is Love Here: Long Takes in Danielle Arbid’s Passion Simple and Celine Song’s Past Lives

1.

Throughout the history of film and film theory, the long take has found and maintained a distinctive place for its knowledge production potential, or affective intensities. The renowned pact with an experience of the real proposed by André Bazin¹ – admired and objected by different schools of thought for the subsequent decades² – could present a path to determine how its sporadic and skilled usage can disturb the sensorial connection with cinematic objects, suggesting an emotional referent to an extra diegetic reality, through lived time and spatiotemporal immersion. However, to interpret the temporal mesh of cleavages and continuities in the hyper-saturated landscape of contemporary images – where impressions of space and time are continuously re-signified³ – solely via realism and its conceptions, could leave out other valuable theoretical approaches. The amply quoted Jean-Luc Godard’s statement about the ethical and political implications of tracking shots – which relates to a Kantian approach to formal qualities and ethics, pointing to the “ascription of moral meaning to mise-en-scène”⁴ – is crucial here, not as much as a defining guiding compass, but as a reinforcement of the ethical/moral/affective values of cinema’s ontological tools.

In this sense, placing itself at the point where films studies and affect theory meet, this essay evokes and juxtaposes two contemporary feature films with complex narrative incursions into love’s tyrannical impact in individual lives and collective dynamics: Passion simple (Simple Passion, Danielle Arbid, 2020) and Past Lives (Celine Song, 2023). Emerging from substantially different production contexts, the two films curiously share several stylistic elements akin to space construction and narrative rhythm. For the purpose of this study, the final scenes of each work will be rigorously analysed, particularly the (paradoxically brief) long takes that encapsulate the films’ respective larger discourses about love. Refusing to cut, as an intentional gesture, within an editing economy of considerably paradigmatic continuity through découpage – where affective and sensory memory are guiding principles – not only comes up as a disruptive event, as it also concentrates the dispersed, wild, unprocessed love that hovers over (haunts?) both films. 

Following contemporary thinkers and the legacy of Deleuzian thought on cinema and affect theory, the argument centres on the ways cinematic temporality can give form, or disrupt social, cultural, and affective conceptions of love. Pushing this interpretation to its radical limits, these long takes are evidence of love’s existence. With numerous points of dialogue – formal, aesthetic, discursive, and mainly temporal qualities – the two feature films also give particular attention to the skin, as a visual and tactile territory of memory, time, and love.

2.

Arbid’s Passion simple is a close adaptation of French Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux’s sublime book of the same name⁵ an ambiguous, assumed to be semi-autobiographical, account of a woman’s unabashedly consuming desire for an elusive foreign man. The protagonist of the film, Hélène (Laetitia Dosch), a literature professor who lives with her son (Lou-Teymour Thion), has an obsessive affair with Alexandre (Sergei Polunin), a young Russian diplomat who, besides being married, is an unreliable character, almost intangible, and moved solely by his own needs. As in Ernaux’s novel, Arbid’s film employs first person narrative strategies – Hélène’s voice narrates segments of the text, with internal dialogue excerpts from the book – focusing on the protagonist’s psychological distresses, and her day-to-day activities, immensely impacted by (the fabricated image of) her lover, his presence, and his absences.

While the novel is set in late 20th century, the film subtly incorporates motifs of current everyday life – like the constant attention Hélène gives to her smartphone, waiting for any sort of sign from the object of her desire – maintaining its emotional and affective essence, which is intrinsically connected to time, especially waiting times. As Roland A. Champagne has argued, the requirement for a “room of one’s own” that Virginia Woolf projected, has in Ernaux’s oeuvre a temporal counterpart, as Ernaux “explores the possibility of a woman’s own time”.⁶ Thus, what Arbid has mostly accomplished with her adaptation was the translation of that literary temporality to an affective-cinematic time, whose impact is clearly manifested during the final moments of the film.

Similarly, Korean-Canadian Song’s Past Lives is built around autobiographical intersections with fictional narrative strategies.⁷ Politics of identity and belonging – particularly concerning gender, national, and professional dynamics – are at the centre of the narrative, deeply influencing the emotional transferences that occur, within both story development and the affective layers of the film. Succinctly, Past Lives is a journey through personal memory and collective temporal landscapes, from the point of view of Nora (Greta Lee; Seung Ha Moon as young Nora), a Korean-born New York-based writer. As a pre-teen in the late ‘90s, Nora initiates an emotionally meaningful relationship with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo; Seung Min Yim as young Hae Sung), shortly before having to move to Canada with her family. Through the years, Nora’s path is revealed through precise diegetic time omissions and articulations: she moves from Canada to New York City in the 2010s and reconnects with Hae Sung via social media and video calls. At a writer’s residency, Nora meets Arthur (John Magaro), whom she eventually marries.

The major narrative conflict ensues when Hae Sung visits New York, in present time, meeting Nora at almost exactly the midpoint of the film, attesting its commitment to temporal rigour. Nora and Hae Sung’s private memories, as well as their distinctive identity formation journeys throughout the years they were physically apart, incite the complexity of the encounter. Here, love is latent, silent, underlying every miniscule interaction, and inevitably colliding with the structured love that binds Nora and Arthur.

Love, as a philosophical and sociological idea, is a multilayered, intricate abstraction that unfolds and spreads across many other conceptual realms: erotics, community, compassion, care, affinity, attachment, desire, optimism, or angst. To aim for a manageable conception of love is to attempt to outline the undefinable. Thus, contemporary affect theory can contribute positively to delimit love’s theoretical scope, as love is seen as neither morally stable nor is it an intrinsically positive emotional response.

Prolific writer Lauren Berlant has left an influential body of work to which the vocabulary of love is no stranger. In an essay where love and desire is placed in confrontation, Berlant asserts that “(W)hether viewed psychoanalytically, institutionally, or ideologically, love is always deemed an outcome of fantasy”,⁸ a statement reverberated throughout other pages in other texts, which points to the collective expectations that are deposited in love as an aggregating substance with the ability to mend, regenerate, produce a sense of purpose. While fantasy is, for Berlant, a condition for the occurrence of love, its cultural/cinematic representations sustain and nurture it, in a symbiotic cycle. As part of an extensive study of the transmission of affects – based on biological models of bodily interactions, and Freudian classifications – Teresa Brennan singles out love as an affect, distinct from all the others, for its unification impulse, unlike the death drive of affects such as anxiety or aggression.⁹

Love can be, then, a product of hyper-codified expectations – in narrative cinema, romantic love is undoubtedly the supreme power, a ubiquitous motif that assures story progression and moral clarification – and, at the same time, an intangible pre-emotional something that grows from narrative conflicts and descriptions into other layers of affective transferences. In the absence of strict tools for identifying this phenomenon, the effective elements that constitute an ontology of the moving image allow for its recognition, mainly the long take, and the fissures it can create.

3.

Although the two films under analysis display similar temporal schemes and aesthetic qualities, they each deal with very different sides of the dynamics of love. Story-wise, Passion simple presents itself as a violent tale of deep infatuation,¹⁰ where reciprocity is nothing but a mirage. The colossal impact Hélène’s attachment to the idea of the foreign diplomat has on her ordinary daily activities is the outcome of the unbridled, uncontrollable, and unexplainable affective properties of love, the film’s prime narrative motor. The simplicity the title suggests is as ironic as it is clear: there is, indeed, plainness to this love, as it is a linear, straightforward projection from one person to another.

On the other hand, Past Lives stages a complex circuit between its three main characters. Nora and Arthur’s relationship is portrayed as stable, based not only on mutual professional understanding, but also evident respect and commitment; it is consummate love in one of its possible configurations.¹¹ Nora’s connection to Hae Sung is the consequence of layers of occurrences and coincidences accumulated over the years. National identity, nostalgia, and the politics of belonging also shape the forces that end up joining them physically together in the same city for a few days: the actualisation of virtual intensities that had lived within their respective bodies throughout the years. Song’s script and camerawork never let her film slip into a simplistic triangular tale of jealousy and deception, or other one-dimensional emotional transactions. In a much nuanced, quiet manner, the coercive paradigms of monogamy as an established institution are contested by the narrative of Past Lives. In the film, the monolithic plan of a closed matrimony gives way to a delicate configuration where individual desire is not incompatible with couple love and partnership.

Accordingly, there are two (not essentially independent) territories where love manifests itself in both films: the narrative elements that organise the relationships between the characters in their respective diegetic universes, and the affective non-verbal transferences that come up from and across narrative development, through cinematic tools. In Passion simple and Past Lives, the long take appears in an analogous mode, as an event, as a temporal continuum that allows for the capturing of untamed love, when no conventional editing pattern could make sensible the overwhelming impulse of love’s existence. Regarding the main character’s journeys, these takes arise at moments of catharsis, after Hélène and Nora say goodbye to Alexandre and Hae Sung, correspondingly, when both women are faced with the inevitability of emotional rupture.

Primarily, concerning the temporal operations and diegetic cohesion that the films unveil, both curiously present a circular structure, beginning roughly where they end. Arbid’s film starts precisely with its final shot, before going back to Hélène’s account of the months when she developed her obsession. Past Lives opens with a continuous take, at a bar counter where Nora is seated between Hae Sung and Arthur. The camera gets progressively close to Nora’s face, isolating her from the two men, in a close-up. She breaks the fourth wall, staring directly to the spectators. The following shot displays a subtitle which reads “24 Years Earlier”, and linearity ensues.

Past Lives

As Past Lives is built around fluxes of memory, from past to present, from Korea to the USA, preserving an idea of multiple life paths – hence its title, which refers to a concept conveyed by Nora, inyeon (인연literally translates to “fate”), a possibly Buddhist idea that says that present encounters between people are the result of previous interactions, in their past lives – the circular scheme adheres to the film’s larger temporal outline. During its final act, the film resumes the scene at the bar counter, but the emotional weight of scenes past overloads the frame. Identity politics through language and shared memories is made evident by the way Nora and Hae Sung communicate, speaking in Korean, leaving Arthur incapable of engaging with their spoken sings or affective affinities.

Ernaux ends her novel with an epilogue that incorporates a reflection about the Gulf War, in an intricate exercise of scale comparison, going from the deep personal psychological descriptions of intimate temporalities to the time of the world, the temporal territory of geopolitical events: a collective sense of being in the world that permeates everyday personal interactions. Arbid’s adaptation leaves out this postscript – it could be read as anachronistic or forcefully made if adapted to late 2010s conjuncture – and concludes with no spoken words, with the prominent long take. The final scene is composed of two shots: a brief close-up of the couple, where Alexendre leans over Hélène’s ear and whispers “mon amour”, and the longer take, which displays the tacit understanding that the affair is over. Hélène walks her lover to his hotel door, and stays behind, watching him through the glass windows, as the Paris night rumbles around her.

Lasting two minutes and 16 seconds, the shot is exclusively about Hélène, her inner sensitivities, and her presence in the city. The camera goes around her head in a circle, openly showing her teary face, as if the dispositif had lost the ability to cut, maintaining an obstinate pressure over her face and over her body. A cover of Yazoo’s “Only You” by British a capella group The Flying Pickets starts playing – extra-diegesis – dictating the mood of the scene, which tends more to resignation rather than sentimentality or melancholy. Hélène watches the transparent doors close on her lover – metaphorically ending their tumultuous affair – and the camera follows them both, walking in the same direction, separated by the window, and by time. As the focus is still on Alexandre walking in the hotel lobby, Hélène is merely a reflection on the glass, a ghost image of herself, following, one last time, the man’s erratic movements. Finally, he goes somewhere out of sight, out of the frame, out of her life, and the camera turns again to Hélène, alone on the sidewalk. The last moment of the continuous take is profoundly humanising: Hélène walks away from the hotel, with her back to the camera. As she looks back, the camera turns around and shows her walking from the front, with her disconcerted face in a close-up in motion. She looks back for the final time, and steps out of the frame. The camera stops moving; the focus that was on Hélène is not adjusted. It’s not the film’s mission to go on, to follow her, or to reveal anything else. The screen goes black after a few seconds, and The Flying Pickets keep singing.

Hélène, a reflection on the glass, Passion simple

Her disconcerted face in a close-up in motion, Passion simple

Past Lives’ cathartic punch equally places an emotionally overwhelmed protagonist saying goodbye, on a sidewalk at night. During the precedent scene – cautiously framed, so as to have a considerable surface of negative space, while Nora, Arthur and Hae Sung are confined to a thin strip of light, inside the married couple’s apartment  – Hae Sung, about to leave New York, shakes hands with Arthur, asking him to visit him in Seoul. Nora accompanies Hae Sung, promising her husband that she will “be right back”, removing herself from the frame. Continuity is guaranteed in the following shot, as Hae Sung and Nora are shown walking down the brownstone’s stairs, and then moving through the sidewalk in an interrupted motion.

Nora, Arthur and Hae Sung confined to a thin strip of light, Past Lives

This long take is essentially split into two parts – roughly two minutes each – traversed by memory and by the affective potency of the close-up.¹² The camera follows the platonic¹³ couple’s silent walk to the taxi’s pick up location, in a seamless tracking shot from right to left. As they arrive in front of a garage door, Nora asks how long the taxi will take, to which Hae Sung responds “two minutes”. This temporal enunciation is indicative of the lived time experienced by all intervening entities – characters, cinematic dispositive and spectators – and while Nora and Hae Sung remain silent contemplating each other, the transference of memories and affects, as well as the emotional weight collected along 100 minutes of filmic time are effervescing, hovering in and out the edges of the frame.

Nora and Hae Sung arrive in front of a garage door, Past Lives

When the drive arrives, a single shot of young Nora and Hae Sung on a Seoul street at night pierces through the long take, presenting an actualisation of the virtual images that compose the past, as thought of by the character’s memory edifications. The visual parallelism with the present condition makes for a candid disruption, like an overlay; the interference of diverse temporalities that clash and shape one another confirms the thematic idea of multiplicity: present lives, past lives, and everything that is and everything that could have been.

The drive arrives’ a single shot of young Nora and Hae Sung on a Seoul street at night pierces through the long take, Past Lives

A momentary instance of “unobtrusive analytical editing”¹⁴ follows. In tight close-ups, a brief shot/reverse shot sequence conveys the existential farewell exchange between the two characters. The taxi leaves, initiating the second moment of the long take, where the camera expresses the inverse movement, tracking Nora, now alone, back to her house. With no further cutting or visual disruption, Song’s camera quietly witnesses Nora’s arrival at the brownstone’s gate, where Arthur is waiting for her. Nora cries profusely. Arthur holds her in a tight embrace. The palpable purity of consummate love is evident, seen and felt through visual composition and the temporality of the long take.

In light of contemporary affect theory, and the aesthetics, ethics and politics of the long take, where do these two sequences meet and diverge? In addition to the similar filmic (and coincidentally diegetic) duration of the shots – and the fact that both take place on the streets of a Western metropolis, at night, and that they depict moments of emotional fractures where the protagonists must part with the idea of someone else – there is arguably a comparable discourse about the convoluted nature of love. Both Passion simple and Past Lives present challenging conceptions of love, and resort to the long take in their respective critical moments to express, through temporal integrity, an earnest and morally neutral stand.

In Passion simple, Hélène is portrayed as a functional woman, a differentiated professor, a mother, a friend. She prepares her classes, she goes on holiday to Florence with her son, but Alexandre’s presence violently and compulsively floods her thoughts and feelings. Love can be a treacherous burden, the fuel of what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism”, for the way it can be an obstacle to individual flourishing.¹⁵ In Ernaux and Arbid’s narrative this tendency is evident, if observed externally. The protagonist’s sole existence is conditioned by a man who supposedly does not meet her emotional needs, if reciprocity is taken as a necessary element of love’s fruition. However, in accordance with Ernaux’s written gesture, Passion simple does not impress any moral view over these events. If it is true that the man’s inconsistency is an impediment to an anxiety-free life, the film also echoes a not so popular defence of unrequited love. For philosopher Alexandra Gustafson, unrequited love is a sublime happening, one that reveals a “noble capacity”,¹⁶ a proof that one is human and willing to go through the trials embodied by the lack of reciprocity. The very last paragraph of Ernaux’s text is clear on this point, as the author writes that to go through a passion with such intensity is a luxury.¹⁷

The final take takes all these entangled, contradictory positions on love and redirects the attention to Hélène’s face. She embodies the violent intensity of a violent love, and endures; her autonomy is dominant and attested by the meticulously choreographed continuous camera movement around her figure. The transformative power of the love that has passed through her body and her life is proof of her being in the world.

In Past Lives love surfaces through a different prism. Where Passion simple presents more mundane, secular, fleshly incarnations of love, Song’s account of triangular interactions draws upon spiritual formulations and cerebral constructions to make sense of love’s ambiguities. According to Nora, by the aforementioned definition of inyeon, marriage is the consequence of 8,000 encounters in successive lives. Although Nora subtly discredits this thought when asked by Arthur about her beliefs, the film openly places her connection to Hae Sung on an ethereal plane, commanded by the possibilities of inyeon as given fact. Nora incorporates the difficult coexistence of a rational, down-to-earth love – Arthur, her writing career, North America, the English language – and a mystical, platonic, identity-driven sense of loving and being loved – Hae Sung, her childhood, Korea, the Korean-language.

As Omar Kasmani has poetically put it, regarding the affective temporalities of migrant people, and the relation to migrant identities with memory and History,

(t)he antidote to affective shortcomings in migration, still, cannot be so plain as adding more history. Migrant-historical affect, more than history per se, is about how individuals and communities in migrancy draw near to a sense of the historical. It pertains to the felt and enfleshed modes by which they/we come close to that which feels physically remote or historically removed and mobilize distinctly affective ways of being and belonging in time.¹⁸

Kasmani’s argument is multi-layered, orbiting around Western Asian–European migration experiences. Nevertheless, it is appropriate to address the affective negotiations of departure and belonging, the fragmented sense of historical agency and identity that emerge from migration movements. In this sense, “belonging in time” can be a powerful description of Past Lives’ approach to love and temporality. Nora’s tears during the long take are an emotional manifestation (collapse?) of the impossibility of fully appropriating the time she inhabits, in New York, with Arthur. Hae Sung’s existence represents more than the comfortable memory of childhood, or even an alternative reality that could have materialised; it stands for an idea of a similar other, affectively connected to Nora by past sensorial experiences, language and mutual appreciation. Thus, Past Lives is not concerned with a “better” outcome for Nora, nor does it construct a moral discourse about choices: events flow, driven by social and political contexts, and individuals find ways to deal with those circumstances.

Still drawing from Kasmani, the flesh and the skin can be sites of engraved memories, political oppression, or affective transferences. Writing about the idealisation of the skin, and its crescent visibility as a conceptual motif (through piercing, tattooing, or religious rituals), Steven Connor declares the ways time can be inscribed in skin, and how love is also “cutaneous”.¹⁹ 

Both Passion simple and Past Lives utilise the skin as a place of temporal assimilation and of affective exchanges. Although the films may not be strictly placed within the realm of the influential Laura U. Marks theory of “haptic visuality”²⁰ – a Deleuzian term that suggests a multisensory apprehension of the moving images, beyond optic visuality, where touch becomes a source of engagement – many of the factors that Marks advances as contributing to the formation of this kind of visuality – mainly, intercultural negotiations, sexual emancipation, and feminist discursive strategies – are structural to the two films.

In Arbid’s film, in the long and frequent scenes depicting Hélène and Alexandre’s sexual encounters, skin abounds. Alexandre’s extensively tattooed body contrasts with Hélène’s pale homogenous cutaneous surface, and the couple’s naked figures constantly fill the totality of the frame throughout the film. Their bodily meetings are preserved in Hélène’s memory and shape her perception of time and place – as visually corroborated by scenes where Hélène has piercing flashbacks of her lover’s skin – being a primary fuel of her love towards the Russian man.²¹

Hélène has piercing flashbacks of her lover’s skin, Passion simple

With different effects, Past Lives also trusts skin to convey the affective layers entangled within the narrative. During an early scene, in Seoul, young Nora and Hae Sung sit next to each other in class, with Nora playfully drawing sweet colourful temporary tattoos on her friend’s arm. The innocent nature of this action – the way childhood love is embedded in the skin – finds an echo later on, when they meet again as adults in New York. Nora and Hae Sung’s constrained hands hold a subway pole, thinly separated, since hand-to-hand contact has acquired a dense emotional/social meaning, far from the unproblematic love manifestations of childhood. Although the space between their hands bears the weight of their physical distance and Nora’s commitment to Arthur, it does not cease to be a visual representation of their love: distant yet close, detached yet hanging on to the same structure.

Young Nora and Hae Sung sit next to each other in class, Past Lives

Years later, as adults in New York, their constrained hands hold a subway pole, thinly separated, Past Lives

As an intrinsically temporal art, cinema lays out a territory where time and ethics are intertwined. D. N. Rodowick states that subjective relationship to film values primarily “our confrontations with time and time’s passing”, suggesting that an ethics of time is a prime affective power.²² Through ellipses, compression, expansion, fragmentation, or the attempt to convey a “real” experience of time, cinema edifies multiple temporalities, with different ethical implications. Love, as an ambiguous, controversial affect, action, or emotion – and a pervasive narrative theme throughout the (still brief) history of cinema – emerges as a discourse with and because of these temporal operations, which have the ability to repress or liberate fluxes of affect.

4.

Lauren Berlant intersects the conventions of romantic love with human temporalities, declaring that “love is a binding relation to time, not a steady state of object desire” describing it as “a form of repetitive attachment that attracts to itself many effects and emotions all at once”.²³ The statement is illustrated by two arguably unrelated feature films – thinly connected by the close years of production, women-centred plots, the importance of writing as a profession and as a narrative trope, visual depictions of skin as a capsule of memory, and the attention given to female sexual and affective experience – that find solid common ground in the precise use of the long take. The uninterrupted felt experience of time, in the films’ respective cathartic scenes, unfolds through precise camera movements and a refusal to cut, providing the complexities of their love-centred plots a non-verbal, affective ground to circulate.

Love in Arbid’s Passion simple exists in a violent, impulsive devotion. The final long take redirects the attention to the autonomy of its protagonist, shifting from a ghost-like projection to a full close-up of her face, as life goes on. In Song’s Past Lives love spreads its ramified roots through continents and timelines, immersing three lives in its multi-layered uncertainties. During its final sequence, a two-part long take – where the camera is much less intrusive than Passion simple, offering a voyeuristic constrained wide shot – subtly follows Nora’s physical and mental journey between Arthur and Hae Sung, past and present, childhood and adulthood, Korea and the United States, idea and concreteness. For the duration of the horizontal camera movements, pierced by a shot from the past, love presents itself fully, in the space between bodies, in the atmosphere of the city, in Hae Sung’s smile, Nora’s assertive walk, and Arthur’s embrace.

Endnotes