At the opening of Past Lives, a woman sits with two men at a bar. We hear some other people wondering who the three are to each other—are they all just friends? Is she married to one but sweet on the other? Through the course of the film, we see those three characters wondering some of the same things themselves, not just about where they might be right now, but about who they might have been before, in earlier lives. Do they love each other now because they hated each other a thousand lives ago? In this life, are they just passing each other by?
Director Celine Song’s semi-autobiographical debut feature is an affecting, grown-up drama about three people, the decisions they make, and how timing and life circumstances sometimes make those decisions for us. We meet Na Young and Hae Sung, 12-year-olds in South Korea who have crushes on each other. Na Young’s parents move her to Canada, where she becomes Nora and loses touch with Hae Sung. A dozen years later, they reconnect in a big way, before life becomes an obstacle again, and things go quiet for another decade, at which point Nora is married and a lot has changed.
Song’s writing and direction are grounded but still have an airiness, despite the emotional weight. We expect certain things from movies, but Song is far more interested in people behaving like people, not in following manufactured plots. One scene finds Nora’s husband pouring out his insecurities, and in lesser hands the movie would have pushed them to fight, but these two know each other, they’ve been together a long time, and by the end of the scene we know exactly where Nora’s head and heart are, even if she never says it out loud. Past Lives is the sort of thing that might blow a hole in your chest if you hold regrets about roads not taken. But here, now, there is only this road, the rest are parts of other lives.
Past Lives is now streaming on Kanopy and Paramount+.
This episode originally aired on July 6, 2023.
