Past Lives (2023)

This is writer Celine Song’s feature debut, and she took a page out of the Greta Gerwig playbook and did a semi-autobiographical story. This is a story of lost love and the lasting endurance of a childhood crush, the access to the past that is possible with digital and social media; the roads not taken, the lives not led, the unrelenting power of regret. It is also a movie that speaks to the migrant experience and the way this creates lifelong alternative realities in the mind: the self that could have stayed behind in the old country, versus the one that went abroad for a new future. The movie covers three different time periods that start when a 12-year-old Na-young is walking home after school with Hae-sung. She and her parents are leaving South Korea for North America. The next section happens 12 years later. Na-young has anglicized her name to Nora and is now a budding writer in New York. Hae-sung is trudging through his military service back in Seoul and studying engineering. The two connect via Facebook, and the beaming excitement of their conversations will have you thinking they might have a future. The movie screen is flooded with their happiness and a single unasked question: should they be together? Our hopes are then dashed, and their meeting when they are yet again 12 years older, and is a wrap up of where their relationship is and has been-- Na-young/Nora talks about the Korean concept of “in-yun”, the karmic bringing together of people who were lovers in past lives. This wonderful film suggests a secular, 21st-century version: the past lives of Na-young and Hae-sung are their childhoods, preserved and exalted in their memory and by modern communications. Past Lives is a great date movie, and a movie for every occasion, too.