Past Lives Review: Celine Song’s Quietly Philosophical Celebration of Time’s Passage

The film establishes how connections forged in our past take new forms as we change with time.

Past Lives
Photo: A24

Twenty minutes into Celine Song’s Past Lives, two young girls, Korean sisters immigrating to North America, practice their English on a plane. “How are you?” one asks. “I’m fine, how are you?” the other responds. Then the first replies with the same phrase. And then the other follows suit. As indicated by their subsequent laughter, the girls are privy to how they can tumble into infinite regression. The film knows that we can just repeat something, over and over again, until we’re stuck in the same moment for as long we like.

“That’s not how life works,” says one of the girls, Nora (Greta Lee), to her husband, Arthur (John Magaro), two decades later, in response to another question: What if she had met someone else at the artists’ residency where the pair first hooked up? The way Nora seems to see things, time only goes in one direction, and the way things happen is the way things happen. The past may in some sense still be with us, but it could never have been different.

Narrative, though, can subvert time’s linearity, allowing us to get a handle on time, to represent past moments to ourselves in order to figure out their meaning in our lives. Thus the narrative of Song’s quietly philosophical debut feature hinges on a moment that repeats. In long shot, the opening of the film observes a conversation at a New York bar between Nora, an Asian man (Teo Yoo), and Arthur, who’s white. All the while, we hear the voices of a man and a woman off-camera, speculating about what the relationship is between the three of them.

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The woman guesses that the two Asian people are siblings, but given the way that Nora smiles at the man and fingers the rim of her glass while he’s speaking, it’s not hard to guess that this conjecture will turn out to be wrong. The man is Hae Sung, Nora’s childhood crush, who’s finally arrived to visit her in New York after 24 years. By the end of Song’s semi-autobiographical film, we will have circled back to this inevitably awkward moment between Nora, her husband, and this man who probably still loves her, the missing context having been filled in.

From the elliptical prologue at the bar, Past Lives jumps back 24 years to when a young Nora (Moon Seung-ah) and her family are preparing to emigrate from South Korea. Just as Nora is exploring her first serious crush, her family moves to Canada, and then, a dozen years later, we pick back up with her as an aspiring playwright in New York. It’s 2011, when people using social media to track down someone who they fell out of touch with felt like some kind of norm, and Nora and Hae Sung strike up a long-distance relationship of sorts.

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Song effectively takes us back to that time where Facebook timeline posts and Skype’s library of goofy sounds felt like the way of the future, rather than relics. There’s a compelling familiarity to the strength of the bond that Nora and Hae Sung are able to forge via videophone, and the Lee and Yoo vibrantly convey the way in which the hesitancy and discomfort of an initial Skype meeting can morph into a relationship that defines your day-to-day life.

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That said, it can be difficult to draw a bead on the film’s first half, which, with its pointed musical underscoring and wistful look at a lost but reasonably uneventful childhood, feels a bit like lily-gilding. It’s not entirely convincing that reconnecting with a childhood crush merits the slow build-up, emotional score, or symbolic images—like the one when the younger versions of the pair part for the last time in Seoul, their paths home diverging like their paths in life.

As the story progresses, though, it becomes clear that Past Lives doesn’t simply represent Song’s romanticization of a relatively ordinary experience. Trying to explain the situation to Arthur circa 2023, Nora cites a Korean concept of fate called “In-Yun,” in which current connections between people are rooted in their relationship in their past lives. “I think it originally comes from Buddhism,” Nora informs him. In the film’s final third, Song’s deliberate but delicate imagery lays out a secularized version of this belief, establishing through visual rhymes how connections forged in our past take new forms as we change with time—but are hardly negated.

Past Lives’s approach to story also feels rooted in Buddhism, given how it builds profundity out of ordinariness and simplicity. It’s a story about accepting that the branching of a timeline isn’t reversible—a motif that, as Everything Everywhere All at Once showed, resonates not just with the experience of lost love but also with that of immigration. Diverging from romances in which lovers are expected to move heaven, earth, and themselves in order to make a moment of love last forever, Past Lives asks us to embrace the changes that come with time.

Score: 
 Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro, Seung Ah Moon, Seung Min Yim  Director: Celine Song  Screenwriter: Celine Song  Distributor: A24  Running Time: 104 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2023  Buy: Video

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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