If you have ever watched a film and been stunned into silence by its brilliance, you’ll know how it feels to watch Past Lives.
Writer/director Celine Song achieves what all first-time filmmakers hope for with a story of fierce reality and deep-rooted emotion delivered with excellence.
Film News Blitz’s Dan Lawrence believes Past Lives is a modern masterpiece.
What is ‘Past Lives’ about?
Past Lives follows Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) in a story of romantic hindsight that spans generations.
Decades after Nora emigrates to the United States and seven years into a loving marriage, her childhood friend and long-time admirer, Hae Sung, visits her in New York.
What follows is a story of hindsight, what ifs and unrequited love.
What makes ‘Past Lives’ so good?
From the opening frame, Past Lives draws you in, setting the stage that will take the romantic drama rulebook and throw it out of the conventional window.
Hae Sung, Nora, and her husband Arthur (John Magaro) chat in a bar in the Past Lives setting scene, all while an unseen couple questions who is in a relationship with whom.
Song has the camera slowly draw in on Nora, until Lee turns and looks directly into the lens, pulling the audience in.
From there, the three lead actors portray their characters with sensitivity, truth, and stark realism.
Those three factors underpin everything about Past Lives, which was shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, and feels like a connection of shared memories.
Challenging genre conventions
In a standard romantic drama, Nora would leave an unloving husband and reunite with her handsome, intelligent childhood crush, Hae Sung.
Past Lives does well to lull the audience into thinking this is a possibility, with Lee and Teo Yoo showcasing a stunning chemistry, and early reveals of Magaro’s Arthur potentially portraying him as somehow lesser.
But Arthur is sincere and a genuine soul who holds his wife Nora in the highest regard, making Past Lives a story that asks profound questions about conflicting romantic ideas.
As he wrestles with misplaced paranoia upon Hae Sung’s arrival in New York, Arthur tells his wife, “You dream in a language I can’t understand. It’s like there’s this whole place inside of you where I can’t go”.
The line is in reference to Nora’s sleep-talking in her native Korean tongue, but beautifully encapsulates Arthur’s conflict and the central conundrum of the film.
Spoilers and summary
It becomes clear that Nora and Arthur’s bond is unshakeable, and instead her and Hae Sung are theorising how in a parallel life things might have worked out between them.
But life and circumstances rarely end up as planned, and the inevitable conclusion of Past Lives is that Hae Sung returns home, spurned, but appreciating he missed his chance by two decades at the least.
It’s no less heartbreaking, though, and Nora’s sobbing into her husband’s arms is the perfect ending, demonstrating the pain and anguish that love and life in the real world can elicit.
Watching Past Lives makes you acutely aware that you’re watching the truest reality of three characters on screen, in a story that unfolds exactly as it would were it true.
It’s a reminder that the best stories are the ones rooted in truth, told by creatives at the top of their game.
It’s no surprise then that Past Lives was nominated for two Oscars, including Best Picture, as well as being named in The New York Times’ top 100 movies of the 21st Century.
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