Past Lives reviews

[Sabin]

Second viewing of Past Lives. No significant change in opinion. I think it works best as a date film for two reasons. Whatever my issues with the film are, it just *FEELS* romantic. It's full of gorgeous locations and Celine Song always has them in the forefront. It has a terrific soundtrack. And even though it's about young people, it captures a large swath of youth for childhood to young adulthood to a still-young adulthood but the phase where you feel tinges of regret and "What if?" It's just a lovely ting to take in. The second reason is that it's full of ideas to unpack with a partner (or likeminded group of friends). Even if I think the film presents ideas rather than explores them, talking about Past Lives leads to meaningful conversations (about relationships, the immigrant experience, artistic fulfillment, false dreams, etc.) and that's not nothing.

Oh, and it's going after something rarely successfully achieved on-screen before (the entirety of a lifelong love story) with the addition of a hook that makes it all the more powerful, and it knocked it out of the park for most people.

And yet, there is something missing at the center of this film However, she doesn't successfully dramatize Nora's struggle. Greta Lee never finds the character and Song's screenplay doesn't help. To put it simply, the movie feels like therapy. It's not just therapy but for me it never became more than therapy. We're told Nora is exceptionally ambitious, wanting a Nobel Prize when she's a child and then a Pulitzer later on when she was Hae Sung reconnect online. There's a lot of fun we could have with this notion of a character. We don't see any. Beneath the surface of the film, America embodies the dreams she cannot have in Korea and that (by extension) Hae Sung cannot fulfill for the bulk of their lives, although the tragedy presented at the end is maybe he (and by extension, Kora) could have; he is more successful than both Nora and Arthur. I mean... that's a sad romantic notion. But by the end of the film, Hae Sung tells Nora that she had to come to America and while he also concedes that they are In Yun (and perhaps their journeys together are not finished) we are meant to believe him. Even though Past Lives is most powerful as a portrait of immigrant grief, I don't think Hae Sung is just telling her or Arthur what they want to hear. That's all well and good, but my problem with that is that we're given no glimpse of Nora as a human being that lets me feel any way about this. She's mostly shown to us in the film explaining who she is to one of two men. If she is forced to live a double-life in America, we're shown no context of what that looks like besides her life with Arthur. Either she is forced to split who she is between parties, or she has become someone else with Arthur in New York and that other side of her is awakened by Hae Sung's arrival. But it's not there and I think that's a problem because much of the movie revolves are the discussion of whether a cipher has changed. The only thing more irritating in a movie than a character who don't remotely understand being validated for all their life's choices is when that character is a writer.

Which is just to say blah blah blah it feels too much like therapy, lacking some dramatic contrasts, and missing some key perspectives. My girlfriend dug it, had similar misgivings, but we talked about everything it presented if not explored for an hour afterwards. That's not nothing. I'm here for what it's both doing and trying to do.

Also, lovely score.

[danfrank]

Spoilers

This is a beautiful film, and a painful one. There are tons of movies that gratify the audience by “going for” the romance (I’m often gratified by these myself), and a good number of movies where deep love sadly gets thwarted by circumstances or just not enough courage on the part of one or both characters to go for it. It’s hard to think of films where the focus is a main character who, despite apparent deep feelings of love, makes a clear and conscious decision to to set a firm boundary on that love and stick with the life she has. This is what makes Past Lives a pretty special film.

I agree with Sabin that there are a lot of captivating ideas to explore here, but I disagree that they should have been explored in this particular film. It worked for me that the film stayed mostly in the emotional realm rather than in the realm of complex ideas. The structure of the film was simple, but the emotions were incredibly complex. The characters’ lives didn’t get messy, and I think that’s because Nora made a series of smart and emotionally disciplined choices, e.g., to end the video calls because they were too torturous with no resolution in site, to be pretty darned open with her husband about what was happening, and finally to put an end to the possibility of romance with Hae Sung. Films usually get messier with this kind of setup, but this one manages to provide great drama without the mess. The continual dramatic tension that was sustained throughout the last several scenes was just remarkable.

A few other thoughts:

The character of Nora’s husband was just beautifully drawn. He was impressive in his ability to express his insecurities while practicing trust in his wife. The scene in the bar was mind blowing in its ability to have the audience feel incredible empathy with all three characters.

I liked that Nora was a playwright, because there were several times in her meetings with Hae Sung where I felt like she was conjuring up dialogue on the spot that was slightly inauthentic in that she was playing the role of the wise, mature, well-boundaried woman when part of her wanted to shout out that she was in love with him, too.

Hae Sung’s character was not deeply drawn, but perhaps that was intentional so that Nora could more easily project her feelings onto him. He kept saying how ordinary he was, and perhaps he was right. Nora’s feelings may have been just a combination of a residual childhood crush, Hae Sung’s incredible good looks, and the seduction of knowing that someone is so in love with you. She, like the audience, didn’t really know him. I think she made a wise choice.

Okri, I really like your comments on the way culture was expressed in the film. Thanks for sharing that part of your life.

[Okri]

I think my own personal experience meant that I automatically presume that fact (acting differently around Hae Sung than other Americans) to be true. My parents' generation were the ones who emigrated to Canada/UK/Italy/USA/Germany etc, but depending on how old they were and all, my generation (with basically me as the dividing line/first) were born in our ancestral country or in the countries they immigrated to. My younger cousin, when getting mad at his older brothers will make a joke about their immigration status. The choosing of English sounding names is such an astute scene because it articulates something a lot of parents do. Or if they don't, it happens regardless. The joke I make about my own name is that my parents didn't really speak English when they spelled it and if a Canadian pronounced my name correctly, I wouldn't respond immediately because I'm only used to hearing my name pronounced correctly in a specific accent. I could list my cousins names and you could guess if they were born "there" or "here." The discussions about Korean vs Korean American vs American are conversations I've had about my own history. Heck, even something like the prizes talk - going from the biggest/most international to a national prize to a smaller/more limited prize... you could simply track that change - how her world gets both bigger and smaller at the same time.

Then we get that stunning bedroom chat between Arthur and Nora that I think articulates much about that experience (and it's the scene for me that really raised the film up in my estimation). I found it quite moving when Arthur talks about wondering if he makes Nora's life bigger or about her speaking Korean in her dreams. Honestly, basically everything Nora said spoke to something I've seen or heard or said myself.

I don't think it's a perfect film. I do wish that Hae Sung was given a bit more agency/inner life as someone who is essentially "left behind." I would've loved a longer scene between Arthur and Hae Sung without Nora [that said, Magaro and Yoo made me believe that scene where he invites him to visit in Seoul). But honestly, when you get something this humane and deeply felt, it feels churlish to complain.

[Sabin]

Very mild spoilers...

Mister Tee wrote
First and foremost, it's a writer's achievement -- I can see it being a prime choice for screenplay awards next season -- but I also had the sense she's a born director.

Reverse these for me and you have my review. This is the kind of debut for which the word "confident" seems born to describe. This is a gorgeously shot and edited, and ambitiously conceived film, but on a scene-to-scene basis I didn't feel the work of a probing, questioning writer at the helm and I spent the bulk of the film moved by moments, convinced I'd seen a quite good film, but not a great one. Still very much worth seeing, especially against this summer's worth of competition.

There's a lot that works in the film. First off, I'll bet the farm it wins the LAFCA for Best Editing. This film skips through time, not exactly evoking the sense of life slipping away but it knows exactly where and when to cut in every moment. The climatic drinks that we circle back to at the end is a master class (along with camera angle and sound) of using editing to create intimacy in a scene. She's a good filmmaker and it's a beautiful-looking, simple film (as Mister Tee says), but maybe a bit too simple. This is a potentially messy scenario dealt with un-messily, and perhaps too un-critically. How is Na Young/Nora transformed by the end of the film? What does she experience? What is her journey? I don't need anything false but the ideas that the film raises are presented but not explored. For example, it's implied that she acts differently when she's around Hae Sung than when she's around her husband or perhaps even an American crowd. That's fascinating. It should be explored. She tells Hae Sung that she is not the person she was when they met anymore. First of all, I don't believe that at all; we are all absolutely who we were in our youths but we're also so much more. But more importantly that's an uninteresting conviction dramatically because the only way that the film has any emotional weight for our protagonist is if she experiences the weight of this lifetime with him as we watch. I felt the same lack of weight as when Hae Sung validates Na Young/Nora's decision to immigrate to America. This film presents ideas as window dressing without exploring them in a way that I found un-moving.

But all of that is why in my opinion it's not a great film. If I'm holding a film like Past Lives up to a higher standard, it's because I have to. What it's doing is the most important thing. It's still very much worthwhile to watch because at the very least it's presenting these ideas, which are ideas I care very much about. It tackles one phenomenon better and more emotionally than any film I can recall: how the presence of social media has affected people in their separate lives. This is a huge development in the lives of my generational cohort How many stories have we seen about people who separate pre-social media and then one hunts the other down and they forge connection, and how many are done with a context this moving? With this much to weight? Also, if I found its narrative conception a bit limiting in how Celine Song uses that time to dig into these characters, I got a buzz from watching a film with this structural design, spending the first half of the film skipping through time as it does and covering so much life. There are several ways in which this is a weighty film that is worthy of patronage. I'm just convinced that a movie like this needed to either be an hour longer to really dig into Hae Sung's return to really what his presence means or just be about that reunion (or just be more sharply incisive) to give its ideas the weight the deserve.

One last thing: it does end very strongly. Everything from the drinks onward felt moving, human, and true. I like Tee's observations about how this film engages with the idea of a multiverse in a human way.

[Mister Tee]

I went to see Past Lives this afternoon, and was startled to find the theatre practically full at 1:30. Maybe the fact it's a (newly-minted) holiday played a part. But the woman who processed my ticket told me that it and Asteroid City are the two films that have been selling out. Of course, I live in the People's Republic of the Upper West Side, so not demographically average.

I adored this. Normally, for a film to wow me, it needs to be complexly conceived; simple is as simple does, in my mind. But this film gave me something different: in overall concept, it's rather simple. But the currents run deep, and each individual layer is richly textured. It's a deeply human movie, that seems to have been conceived light years away from the Hollywood factory, but it works on such an emotional level that I can't believe most audiences will feel anything but the sweetest kind of heartache.

It's certainly an extraordinary first film for Celine Song. First and foremost, it's a writer's achievement -- I can see it being a prime choice for screenplay awards next season -- but I also had the sense she's a born director. There may only be only a few truly memorable images (I loved one of the characters strolling by a moving carousel), but I always felt she knew just where to put and frame her actors. And her work with those actors -- primarily Greta Lee and Teo Yoo, but also John Magaro in his few prominent scenes -- is immaculate. The film reaches crescendo in a barstool discussion that includes a line that, in its simplicity, tore my fucking heart out. And then it climaxes in a wordless scene, where what the characters don't do is screaming into all our heads, and we experience the alternate-life the film has told us we all know about and yearn for. There've been a ton of multiverse movies of late. This is the one that gets to the human heart of it.

Though the film is to a great extent a two-hander, you can sense it's made from the female character's point of view: Nora's discovery that Hae-sung has been searching for her is our first awareness of that plot point; we also hear about Hae-sung's New York trip when she brings it up. I imagine most films would have given the two strands equal coverage. But I like this slightly different approach; for one thing, it feels fresh, but, for another, it makes clear the fact that she's the one with a choice in this matter. Though the outcome affects him, it's her story being told.

Bottom line: the film isn't as grandly conceived as, say, Tar, but it's more fully satisfying than any film I saw last year. And maybe up there with Drive My Car among films I've liked most since COVID cast its dark shadow on the movie business.