Past Lives Review
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
This review was written as part of IGN’s coverage of the Best Picture nominees at the 96th Academy Awards – keep an eye out for the video rounding up our reviews of all 10 films. Past Lives is streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.
Lying awake in a tiny Brooklyn apartment, novelist Arthur (John Magaro) turns to his wife, fellow wordsmith Nora (Greta Lee). “I was just thinking about what a good story this is,” he says of the quasi love triangle not quite threatening his marriage – the unexpected reappearance of Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), Nora’s childhood sweetheart from Seoul, now a strapping thirtysomething who’s come to New York to catch up with the one who got away. As a general rule, screenwriters should probably avoid dialogue that sounds like it’s complimenting the script itself. But the characters in Past Lives, the first movie written and directed by Celine Song, are writers themselves – the very kind of people who go looking for “good stories” in the events of their own lives.
Anyway, Arthur is right. Spanning decades and continents, the saga of Nora and Hae Sung is a good story. It’s also semi-autobiographical: Like her heroine, Song is a playwright who was born in Korea, moved with her family to Canada as a child, and landed in the States as an adult. She, too, married a Jewish writer, and – if the press cycle for this Sundance sensation is to be believed – floated in and out of touch with an old classmate/crush. From these firsthand experiences, Song has shaped a tranquil meditation on time, memory, and diasporic longing. Maybe too tranquil, truth be told: The most critically acclaimed movie of 2023 is more pleasant than dramatic, smoothing out any messy emotions that might kill its dreamy vibe or complicate its philosophical conclusions.
Song’s savviest choice is her first. Past Lives begins brilliantly, planting a seed of intrigue with its opening image: a voyeuristic shot of Nora, Hae Sung, and Arthur sitting in a warmly lit bar. From off screen, strangers – no more privy to the truth than the audience is at this early point – try to parse who the three are to each other. Like these people-watchers, we’re drawn to the quiet intensity of the conversation, and the ambiguity of the relationships.
From here, Song flashes back a full 24 years, to when Hae Sung and Nora (who then went by Na Young) were 12-year-old classmates in Seoul. They lose touch when Nora’s family moves abroad, but cross paths again a dozen years later via Facebook and Skype, when she’s a graduate student in New York and he’s finishing his mandatory military service in Korea.. Despite her roots in the theater, Song sidesteps staginess during this lovely middle passage, covering months in crosscutting montage as feelings develop between the childhood friends, until the distance – geographic and otherwise – proves too great. The scene where Nora breaks things off, freeing them both of a romance with no apparent future, is beautifully performed and staged, and plausibly restrained: not a screaming match but an agreement reached with resignation.
“Write what you know” isn’t the only chestnut Song seems to have taken to heart in her first feature. Per Picasso, she also steals from the best, basking Past Lives in the swoony influence of creative ancestors. There’s a strong touch of the great Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai in Song’s affinity for shimmering reflective surfaces and barroom incandescence; when Hae Sung and Nora reunite in their 30s, their hands hover close on a subway bar, never quite touching – a vintage Wong shorthand for desire unconsummated. The duo’s wander down memory lane also recalls one aching subplot of Edward Yang’s parting masterpiece, Yi Yi. And when Hae Sung speculates that perhaps in another lifetime they were strangers who met on a train, there’s no mistaking the nod to Richard Linklater’s celebrated, bittersweet Before trilogy, the ultimate on-and-off romance of late-20th/early-21st-century cinema.
Of course, Linklater told his love story across three installments released over 18 years, letting his actors grow older in tandem with his characters. Past Lives attempts to cover an even longer stretch of time in just 106 minutes – an epic-in-miniature approach that requires forgoing specifics of the characters’ lives in favor of a seductive flow of incident. When Nora finally meets Arthur at a writers retreat, for example, their communion is communicated in quick brushstrokes, through snippets of voice-over and body language. Maybe there’s no easy way to capture the full weight of time’s passage at traditional feature length. The actors do their best to convey the long transition from early to middle adulthood without exaggerating the emotional confusion of the former; it’s a subtler growth spurt the two articulate, Yoo tightening Hae Sung’s vulnerability while Lee – a sitcom scene stealer granted a deserved starring role – gently expresses how Nora finds herself over the years.
But as a love story, Past Lives only feigns balance. Though the film sketches the discrete, internationally distant worlds of Nora and Hae Sung with equal brevity, you’d have no trouble guessing which of the two is the author surrogate. At times, Song seems incapable of imagining the life her estranged companion might have lived in her absence; there’s a faint flicker of ego in her depiction of Hae Sung as someone unmoored without Nora, drifting aimlessly through his 20s and early 30s, pining for the moment he can see her again. In that respect, the film almost plays like a flattering daydream: What if that ex you haven’t seen in ages has spent the entire time since thinking about you? For Nora, Hae Sung is more of a walking, talking symbol of her cultural displacement. The implication is that her attraction to him is really a throb of nostalgia for the life she left behind when she left Korea. It’s a savvy thematic framework that should probably leave the real-life inspiration for Hae Sung feeling a little annoyed.
More elegantly shot and cut than your average American indie (particularly one made by a playwright trading the stage for the screen for the first time), Past Lives is never less than fetching in its poetic serenity. But by the final stretch, when Hae Sung has returned for a New York vacation that’s really just an excuse to see Nora again, a viewer might find themselves fighting a longing of their own – a nagging desire for some actual tension between these characters. Everyone approaches an unusual situation with a maturity and emotional intelligence that borders on superhuman. Even Arthur seems only theoretically jealous of the time his wife is spending with her long lost sweetheart; Magaro, in his unkempt bohemian way, is almost doing the micro-budget version of a Baxter, the archetype of an unbelievably accommodating rom-com partner aware that there’s something more romantic in a love story that doesn’t involve him. Like Arthur, the movie is arguably too nice. Its quizzical wisdom allows for nothing so uncomfortable as resentment or hurt feelings.
Past Lives is more pleasant than dramatic.
Perhaps that wisdom is retrospective. Past Lives creates the impression of an anecdote that’s been flattened a little through dramatization, its rougher edges sanded down for the sake of bigger points about how we change over the years. There’s something predigested about the movie, especially as it strains for profundity in the backstretch, with Nora and Hae Sung recasting their own almost-romance as a Buddhist parable of sorts. What we’re watching, perhaps, is the version of this “good story” that Nora herself would tell: a little touching, a little easy, bittersweet in a highly palatable way. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that there’s a more tumultuous version of these events – a better story – lurking beyond every exquisitely composed frame.
