Past Lives

 Past Lives [2023] 

Starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Maguro

Direction by Celine Song 

Languages: Korean, English

Can we all agree that A24 is the best? Lady Bird, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and now this! 

I am finally in the US, which means that I can actually see a variety of movies in the theatre (film in my area is very heavily censored). And of course the first one I went to see was Past Lives. I was told my one of my friends here that ‘Past Lives’ broke her - her experience of immigration to the US was plagued with ‘What Ifs’ that resurfaced after she had seen this movie. And whilst that wasn’t the case for me, the movie was pretty good. 

I found that my experience of watching this movie was very similar to what I faced watching La La Land. As is often the case with these long, very artsy romance movies, the movie ends and I think the movie was decent. However, as time passes, the storyline starts to build, and you start to connect all the dots to form one big, cohesive picture. The difference between this and La La Land, however, was the fact that the plot line in this movie felt far more tangible - and that was the case in several ways. 

One way in which this was the case was through the use of Korean. I am a native English speaker with no background in Korean whatsoever, but the very fact that Korean was the primary language used made everything far more accessible to me, at least. The use of language is sentimental within itself, and in the case of the main plot, Korean was synonymous with departure, and leaving a life behind. The fact that Korean is used throughout despite the passage of time bound everything together quite neatly. 

Another way that everything was made more accessible was the fact that the setting was a lot more grounded than La La Land. La La Land was very fantastical, set in Hollywood. That setting alone is very exclusive, and it was for that reason very difficult for me to feel a strong connection to where everything was set. There was also so much emphasis on locale that it just alienated me even more. However, with Past Lives, the place where the story was set was not very important - it was rather what the transition in place from the suburbs of Seoul to New York which highlighted the distance and disconnect to a past life.  And although the whole narrative of ‘past lives’ came through a fictional tale in Korean culture, everything remained very grounded, cemented largely in reality. 

As I’m writing this, I’m feeling a slight existential crisis come on - but I think that was the nature / purpose of film. Can we ever really be distanced from our past selves? Are connections more layered than they are at surface level? Will our past always be there to haunt and disrupt us? How far can we run from what we were? Is life predestined? This movie was an exploration of these very abstract notions - and the beauty of the movie was that there was no answer. Everything was left hanging on a moment of suspense - it was almost as if the movie was finished yet simultaneously unfinished. Speaking of the word ‘unfinished’, that is a word that I will use to characterize the whole film. I promise you,  that word will make sense when you watch this. 

The dialogues were also so powerful - very simplistic yet packed in meaning. Never would I have thought that I would have such a visceral reaction to the phrase, ‘Wow…it’s you’ in Korean, or to the phrase, ‘I left her behind with you’. 

Everything comes together so well when the movie ends, but it’s a bit of a journey to get there (there are some portions which are quite slow). So definitely watch this when you’re awake and fully responsive - otherwise you’ll miss out on chunks of narrative which are so, so important. 

9/10