REVIEW: Past Lives [2023]

Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 105 minutes
Release Date: June 2nd, 2023 (USA)
Studio: A24
Director(s): Celine Song
Writer(s): Celine Song

If you leave something behind, you gain something too.

Despite what the movies would have you believe—especially the romantic variety—fate is just as quick to punch you in the gut as it is to sweep you off your feet. It’s why Arthur (John Magaro) is such a fantastic character. He understands what “should” happen in a situation that demands he be the obstacle to his wife’s happiness. That his own joy should be expendable in order for the audience to leave with a smile on their face knowing true love prevailed.

So, when he starts laughing in bed at how perfect and scripted and interesting the idea of his wife meeting up with her childhood sweetheart after twenty plus years apart is, you understand his emotional instability. Because we’ve been conditioned to gravitate towards the spark of kismet rather than the sigh of convenience. From an outsider’s perspective, Arthur doesn’t stand a chance.

Except writer/director Celine Song didn’t create a fantasy. Past Lives is sexy and funny and tender along its seemingly familiar path, but it never ignores the mundane truth that destiny, more often than not, keeps people apart. Reality isn’t a fairy tale. It doesn’t allow us to press pause on our life’s ambitions to travel halfway around the world for someone we used to know.

Maybe Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) do belong together. Maybe if her family didn’t decide to immigrate to Canada, they would have been inseparable. Maybe they still might … if the timing is right. If the stars align. If the chance to see what might have been and could still be proves that they’re each the person they remembered in youth and not merely a faded facsimile that can’t match the nostalgia. Because they did love each other in whatever way twelve-year-olds can. And they do long to experience that feeling again.

Song expertly structures her film in a way that dares us to presume where it’s going. That’s why she has us meet her three characters sitting on the other side of the bar with the disembodied voices of our stand-ins jokingly guessing what their deal is. Are Nora and Arthur a couple meeting with her brother? Are Nora and Hae Sung together with Arthur playing the third wheel? She’s sitting closer to Arthur but he doesn’t seem to be in the conversation. Is that because he’s not? Because he’s being cut out of it? Because he’s a complete stranger? Who knows?

That’s why we must rewind twenty-four years into the past to begin to understand the complexity of their trio. We meet Nora and Hae Sung properly in much younger bodies as they compete at school and laugh with carefree abandon before parting ways to perhaps never see each other again. Until a chance lark challenges fate.

Where things go next is an honest depiction of lust and longing as well as the unavoidable truth that we can’t get everything we want all at once. Will we regret that which falls by the wayside? Sure. But as Nora’s mother says early on, leaving something behind also means gaining something else. A young Hae Sung won’t comprehend the nuance of that statement. Twenty-year old Hae Sung might not either. The hope is therefore that thirty-something Hae Sung might.

The same goes for Nora despite regret not being quite as prominent in her life. Whereas Hae Sung longs for the love he felt in adolescence, Nora is driven by the pursuit of success in her career. He’s a good Korean boy. She’s the daughter of liberal artists willing to break free from tradition to pursue new joys regardless of them being born out of rejecting the present safety of comfort. So, maybe their longing is for what they represent more than who they are.

Past Lives‘ best moments are the awkward silences that never feel as long as they are. That’s how good Lee and Yoo are. How good their chemistry proves since those silences aren’t a product of having nothing to say, but holding back what they wish they would. What good is Hae Sung telling Nora he’ll miss her way back in middle school, though? What good is pining over a perpetually stillborn relationship when their focus is firmly affixed to other imperatives that demand it stay that way?

The time is simply never right to speak up because making those feelings heard risks destroying bigger dreams for a fantasy that might never come true. That doesn’t mean they can just walk away. Or that they can avoid running to the edge of that cliff hoping the other might finally jump before something else shakes them awake. Sometimes the love you never shared and lose hurts most because it exists unblemished in your imagination. And the love you do have is left selflessly consoling you from the resulting irrational yet debilitating pain.