Past Lives (2023)

 

Past Lives allows viewers to ponder questions that many of us may have about whether or not our lives would have been different had we taken a different path in a relationship in our past. “What might have been” is a powerful motivation for some people, and this film explores a relationship over a twenty-four-year period to raise that kind of question. Well, calling it a “relationship” might be a bit of a stretch since the two main characters aren’t actually together except for a short period of time when they are very young. Still, it makes for a compelling and emotional movie that will likely having you thinking about some of the people from your own past that you’ve always wondered about in terms of how happy you might have been had you made different choices.

The film has three distinct periods that it covers, and each of them is beautifully and sensitively handled. Twenty-four years in the past, in the year 2000, Na Young (later Nora) and Hae Sung are classmates in South Korea and just 12 years old. He clearly has a crush on her, and they even manage to go on what is ostensibly a “date” arranged by their mothers. However, they’re very competitive about their grades and sometimes hurt each other’s feelings. When she reveals that her family is immigrating to Canada, he’s clearly pained by the impending move. It’s a very emotional sequence, but you might imagine that the love shared by a couple of 12-year-olds couldn’t really matter all that much, right? Little are we prepared for what happens over the next couple of decades.

Twelve years later, she’s now living in New York (and played by the fantastic Greta Lee) and working as a writer, and he’s an engineering student in Korea (and played by the impossibly attractive Teo Yoo). She finds him on Facebook, that repository of past lives, and discovers that he’s been looking for her. They start to Skype with each other, and you can sense that their feelings for each other are intensifying. However, Nora decides to cut off communication with Hae because they cannot see each other in person, given that she wants to focus more on her writing and he’s about to go to China to learn Mandarin. She leaves for a writer’s retreat (how very literary of her), where she meets a guy named Arthur (John Magaro) and falls in love. Hae starts dating a woman in South Korea and hangs out with his friends, but you can sense that he’s lonely even when he’s with other people. He would clearly rather be with Nora. Did I mention that he’s not seen her since they were both 12?

Another twelve years pass and we’re presumably now in the present time. Hae Sung comes to New York for a week on vacation, and he wants to see Nora again. She’s married to Arthur although they don’t seem to have the happiest or most dynamic of marriages. They are, in that way that couples sometimes are, contented with and accustomed to each other. Hae is single and seemingly wants to reconnect with Nora, maybe just not in a romantic sense. Arthur is, understandably, a bit jealous. I mean, if you look at the actor who plays Hae, you could see why Arthur might be feeling—shall we say—inadequate? Arthur thinks that the story of these two childhood friends is an interesting one, but Nora insists that she doesn’t love Hae. There’s also a bit of a language barrier since Hae’s English is not strong and Arthur’s Korean is even weaker. That makes for some misunderstandings and some apologies for misunderstanding.

The camerawork on Past Lives is really quite extraordinary, and I’m not sure why it wasn’t recognized more for its cinematography and its editing. It’s a gorgeous movie. There are lots of closeups of the two leads, and that allows for some very emotional expressions by the actors. While Hae is in New York, the camera seems to linger just a bit longer than in the other two segments, perhaps to recreate that sense of wistfulness that permeates so much of the movie and that has intensified as it has progressed.

The film discusses a Korean concept called inyeon. Nora talks about it with Arthur during their time together at the writer’s retreat, actually. It’s something about how the past continues to influence us, but it also is about how connected we are or might be to other people. Maybe you see someone in the street, and you actually knew each other in a previous life and that’s why you’re in each other’s presence now. It’s an interesting concept, and you can see that the story is about how much perhaps the memories of Hae Jung still haunt Nora a bit and how much she is still on his mind. There’s no happy ending for these two, of course, since this isn’t a Hollywood movie, but it’s not necessary for us to have a sense of closure when there’s a concept like inyeon out there. You might be sad about the film’s ending, but in a way, all of the characters are somewhat sad and somewhat not. Why should we be any different from them at that moment?

The film was written and directed by Celine Song, and it’s a smashing debut for this filmmaker. It alternates between Korean and English, and it represents in some ways just how international filmmaking (and filmgoing) has become. Song was nominated for her screenplay, but she would have been a worthy addition to the list of nominated directors as well. The story is reportedly semi-autobiographical, but I don’t think we have to know which parts are “true” in order to sense the truthfulness of the emotions being portrayed.

Speaking of portrayals, Lee as the adult Nora is fantastic. She’s complex and thoughtful and reserved, but you can tell what her character is feeling from the way that Lee delivers her lines. Yoo is quite powerful as a young man whose emotions are so visible. You might not expect such a deep performance, but he’s likely to become a major international star if this role is any indication. Magaro’s Arthur is more significant to the final segment of the movie, but he manages to bring some humor and humility to the role, and when it’s just Arthur and Hae talking to each other, Magaro does a great job of demonstrating Arthur’s generosity of spirit. He knows that his wife needed to see Hae, and he also knows by that point that she will not be leaving their marriage.

We’re left at the end of Past Lives with questions that cannot easily be answered. How powerful is a first love? Does it affect you for the rest of your life? Are your other relationships somehow a reflection of what happened with that first love? As philosophical as Past Lives is, you don’t get answers to these kinds of questions, and we don’t really need them, do we? Isn’t it more satisfying to have that sense of mystery than to know definitively? This is a film that is very focused on emotions, and it’s about how we express our feelings and hash out our emotions with other people. There might have been a time in the past when the Academy Awards wouldn’t have noticed a film like this. I’m grateful that those days are, I hope, over.

Oscar Nominations: Best Motion Picture of the Year and Best Original Screenplay