One of the most impactful moments in "Past Lives" occurs when Nora (Greta Lee) arrives at a park in New York to reunite with her childhood friend Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), whom she hasn't seen in 24 years, since their family emigrated from Seoul. As the two approach each other, in front of a intricately patterned white concrete wall, the film cuts to another scene we've seen before: young Nora and Hae Sung playing amidst giant sculptures in a park in the South Korean capital. Hidden behind the enormous heads of the sculptures, only their faces visible through the holes, they are in the exact same positions they find themselves in decades later, an ocean apart.
It's a visually exquisite rhyme executed by director Celine Song, with invaluable assistance from Shabier Kirchner's milky cinematography (from "Small Axe"), which balances the lights, textures, and atmospheres of such distant metropolises, and Keith Fraase's sharp editing (from "Knight of Cups"), always attuned to the timing of the meanings the filmmaker wants to convey on screen. However, as the story of "Past Lives" unfolds, it becomes clear that this moment is not just a visual seam between past and future, an easy parallel of these characters' lives: it is the entire point of the film, embodied in an image.
On paper, "Past Lives" is one of those films where "nothing happens." Hae Sung's visit to New York, his reunion with Nora, doesn't forever change their life trajectories, nor does it immediately propel them into radically transformative decisions. But what did we expect to happen, after all? Arthur (John Magaro), Nora's husband, even jokes about it, saying that if she were to leave her life in the US to be with her childhood love in Seoul, the story would turn into a melodrama – and he would be the villain, of course, the "white husband who gets in the way of predestined lovers.
However, Song is not telling that kind of story. The way her screenplay denies major dramatic shifts, veers away from the narrative of a grand rekindling of love, is part of the exercise she proposes with the film. "Past Lives" creates an adult world where the significant choices the characters could make have already been made, where all the dramatic subjects already know very well "where they ended up and where they should be." Young Nora and young Hae Sung, seen only through the cracks in the giant heads of the sculptures in Seoul. What happens when solid, concrete individuals meet others who knew them when they were nothing like that?
For "Past Lives," what happens is a reckoning between the potential of the past and the reality of the present, but this is a struggle in which the essential immateriality of one has no chance of defeating the essential materiality of the other. Song effectively mines the small tragedies that arise from this confrontation, delicately highlighting in the text how Nora's playwright dreams have diminished (she wanted to win the Nobel, then the Pulitzer, and now, maybe, the Tony – but she doesn't think about it all the time), or how the emotional trajectories of the two protagonists have followed opposite arcs of vulnerability and solidification within notions of masculinity and femininity.
All of this is in the dialogue, but it is also where the film finds its most obvious weaknesses. There is an element of ego stroking in "Past Lives," especially in how it constantly praises Nora's ambition, the director's avatar, and her embrace of Western values after emigration. Adored by two men for whom she means opposite things ("the one who left" and "the one who stayed"), she ends up doing the same job for both, expanding horizons, "making life bigger" than it may seem. This is the most superficial part of the text, especially in the climactic dialogue between Nora and Hae Sung, and it somewhat contradicts the film's ode to the smallness of life.
Due to this slight disagreement within "Past Lives" itself, focused on the main character, Greta Lee doesn't always manage to overcome a certain artificiality in her portrayal of Nora. She has great moments, especially when she needs to conceal immense emotions in small gestures: desire in a sidelong glance, resignation in a way of walking, uncertainty in a way of sitting. But in the end, it's Teo Yoo who steals the scene with a much more integral and imposing portrayal of male fragmentation in the face of internal and external pressures. It's an arc of discovering and suffocating one's own vulnerability that hits at the heart of an almost universal male experience.
And it is precisely in universality, in how it chooses to express it, that "Past Lives" finds the strength to overcome its more wavering elements. Song and her collaborators are persistent and consistent in their prioritization of visual ideas that convey something, whether it's how they always emphasize the geography of the cities where the story takes place (is there anything more concrete about who we are, after all, than the place we live?), or their tendency to follow the characters' wanderings with horizontal camera movements – from right to left when they seek or reminisce about something from the past, from left to right when they head towards their futures, including at the end. The universal visual language of the timeline, of writing and reading.
In this way, "Past Lives" positions itself as a piece of cinema born and shaped by a powerful expressive intention. Its understanding of cinematic language is as crystal clear as its vision of the unchanging and bittersweet solidity of adulthood. And if it lacks a bit of self-awareness to eliminate some tendencies of self-glorification, who can blame it? After all, that's also very adult of it.
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