Past Lives Review: Wrong Person, Right Time, Great Movie

We’ve all seen films about the ‘right person, wrong time’ before (The Notebook, La La Land ) but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie about the ‘wrong person at the right time’. That was until I watched Celine Song’s Past Lives. A story of long lost childhood sweethearts reconnecting. Picking apart how their actions in life had kept them leading back to one another.

Because romance stories are so easy to get invested into, people often find themselves neglecting the fact that filmmaking is a visual medium. As much as I do love the story of The Notebook, I do feel that it neglected it’s cinemtaography, that is’t he case with Past Lives. The first thing you’ll notice about Past Lives is Celine Song’s meticulous directing style. Hae Sung and Nora (our two protagonists) are two people with different lives. Hae Sung feels at home in Korea/in his own home so his shots are constantly filled with open spaces and warm loving light, Nora, on the other hand, feels trapped and domesticated by the world around heer, Song wasn’t afraid to often have Nora obscured or behind furniture. Having her surroundings dominate the space more than she does. This subtler style of filmmaking is Song’s superpower in my opinion. Great cinematography can help elevate an okay story into a great one (for example; Game night or The Blair Witch Project) but this is far from an ‘okay’ story.

It feels as if every love story that could be told, has been told. Marriage, adultery, childhood sweethearts, star crossed lovers, forlong lovers, water tribe sons falling in love with the moon, etc., etc., so I was pleasantly surprised to feel like Past Lives is a story I had never seen told on the big screen before. The uncomfortable bittersweet nature of thinking ‘What if?’ is rarely told with this much nuance and messiness (in a good way trust me). The typical ‘what if/childhood sweetheart’ love story usually has one of the characters end up with someone who is just ot good for them but Celine Song decided to flip this trope onto its head and make everyone;’s significant other very likable. Arthur is a great guy and you almost don’t want him to lose NMora but you’re also rooting for Nora and Hae Sung to end up together.

It’s this messy conflict of emotions that elevates Song's storytelling into something more than a simple love story. I feel that often too many stories boil themselves down into ‘heart vs head’ and even MORE times I feel like head would be the better option but this film fully avoids all of that. It’s not ‘heart vs head’ it’s the annoyance of having both your heart AND head tell you what you need to/don’t want to hear.

Very early on, the movie speaks of the Buddhist idea of ‘In-Yun’. The idea that everyone you interact with will have an effect on your next life, and in order to become friends with someone you need to have built up a ton of In-Yun and to marry them would require eight-thousand lifetimes, which is both comforting and haunting for Nora and Hae Sung and I believe that’s what Celine Song is trying to speak on in this film. Whether or not In-Yun is real doesn’t matter, what matters is your present life, where you are and who you are and how chasing a perfect love story may lead to a perfect love story, it just might not go how you expected it to.

In a year that saw Oppenheimer, Barbie and Across the Spider-Verse hit our screens, it’s crazy to think that such a lo-fi and small story is a contender for film of the year. Past Lives is a shining example of why cinema doesn’t always need to be high brow fantastical escapism and how the mundane can be spun into something beautiful. The movie is small with only three characters of note and yet it has a profound story to tell and a beautiful way of doing so. If this is Celine Song’s big screen debut, then she’s undoubtedly earned a life long fan in myself.

TLDR: Watch this movie in this lifetime, 10/10.