Past Lives (2023)

Past Lives offers a bittersweet love story that’s hard to categorize. Call it a romance. It starts with a pair of 12-year-olds growing up in Korea. Hae Sung (Leem Seung-min, then Teo Yoo as the grownup) and Na Young (Moon Seung-ah, then Greta Lee as the grownup, called Nora) are 12-year-old childhood sweethearts. Na Young’s mother arranges and chaperones their one date. She says it’s so Na Young will have happy memories, knowing the family has plans to emigrate to Canada. Nora is ambitious. As a 12-year-old she wants to win a Nobel Prize in literature. As a 24-year-old—with the picture transitioning toward the present—she is a playwright and wants to win a Pulitzer. The second part of Past Lives, when Hae Sung and Nora are 24, presents a classic aching long-distant internet relationship. They communicate by phone and computer and have long talks at all hours of the day and night. They are plainly in love. But Hae Sung can’t travel to New York City, where Nora has settled, for another year, and Nora can’t make it to Seoul for a year and a half. At that point Nora looks at the futility and calls a timeout. Hae Sung is heartbroken and left feeling abandoned again. Almost immediately, Nora meets the man she will marry and we get word Hae Sung has a girlfriend. For the third part of the movie, another 12 years has elapsed and Hae Sung is traveling to New York to see Nora for the first time in more than 20 years. Past Lives has many of the beats of a romantic comedy but it’s much more poignant than funny. Nora has a real marriage, with fights and passion and connections (they are both writers), and she has a career, living in a small apartment in the East Village. Hae Sung has become an engineer with an office job, but he still lives at home with his parents. In many ways he feels uncomfortably like an incel. They have grown far apart because they have been raised in different families. But they still feel a connection. The picture starts out pretty well and gets better as it goes. The last section is full of tender and awkward moments as Nora and her husband and Hae Sung go out for a last night on the town. The final parting is agonizingly slow, making us feel all the complex welter of emotions set in motion. Past Lives is often beautiful—one to see for sure.