What I liked about Past Lives is that it wasn’t spectacular. It wasn’t just a tale of two people separated by circumstance and agonizing over it, the ‘what-could-have-been’ lingering in the air like the scent of a lover who’s walked away. Nor was it that film about that connection that fundamentally changed you and you spend the rest of your life searching for. (I still love you, Linklater)

No, what I liked about Past Lives is that it was so … mundane. At its core, I believe it was a human story about what shapes us – and yes, who we love and connect with is a part of it, but fundamentally what shapes us are our choices and they’re ours and ours alone to make. The plot is as simple as can be; Nora and Hae Sang are childhood best friends, and after Nora’s family moves to Canada they find each other on Facebook 12 years later. Their friendship rekindles - but they’re 24 now, ripe for the future, entangled in their careers, messes, and lives, and are miles apart from each other. As the initial infatuation wanes and they settle into a routine of video calls and asking about each other’s day, they realize they’re putting their lives on hold, waiting for the moment to finally be with each other. Waiting for a moment that might never come. 

Roland Barthes had once said, “I am a lover because I am the one who waits”. Isn’t it a lover’s identity to wait? This waiting for another, some say it is the wait to be whole again.

It is the same waiting that Connell and Marianne kind of do for each other in Normal People. I don’t think it is just waiting for your lover, though. I think, in love, the wait is endless. You wait for someone to love you. You wait for someone to reach you. You wait with someone, alongside them. You wait to be near someone; you wait for the right time and the right place and the right person too. And between these moments of waiting you live a life. 

Past Lives, as much as it is a story of waiting (as all love stories are), is also a story of living. It is about the lives Nora and Hae Sang lead independently of each other. They make choices that tug at the thread that ties them. The next time we see them, another 12 years have passed and Nora is married to a writer she met at an artist residency in Montauk (“Have you watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?”). Hae Sang is in Seoul, living with his parents like good Korean boys do, taking a break from his girlfriend that he might marry someday. He meets his friends for dinner and drinks. She gets coffee and meets her husband at his book signing. They move on, with new people, and create new lives and new versions of themselves. 

While the film is tinged with longing, I like that it also focuses on Nora and Hae Sang’s acceptance of the choices that brought them where they are. When they meet they don’t immediately conclude that they’re perfect for each other. Instead, they spend their time lingering, getting to know each other all over again. It is a bittersweet search we all embark on when we meet people from our past.

We try to spot in them their past selves, looking for any sign that could make us say ‘Hey! I knew you when you were this. Are you still this? Do I still know you?’. 

I once read somewhere that the people we love never really leave us. And not just in the way that we carry them in our hearts because they matter to us. But in the way that when you love someone it changes you. Their love, and your love for them, transforms you; who you are from now on is someone marked by this love. I believe that is what Past Lives was about: at every point, Nora and Hae Sang’s love for each other marked them, and it carried them forward too. It wasn’t as much about a missed opportunity as it was about a lingering connection that both shapes you and is shaped by you. And when Nora tells her husband that this is her life, with him, that this is the life she has chosen — she’s affirming her role in shaping her life, as much as her life has tried to shape her too. 

The movie’s title Past Lives is a reference to the Korean word ‘In Yun’ which means fate, a way to explain your connection in the present day by linking it to a connection in your past life. But I think past lives also means every life we leave behind as we grow up. Some of these lives fade away, some merge into the next, but some come back momentarily when you’re with the person you shared that life with. When they meet, all those years later, Nora tells him that the little girl he knew doesn’t exist anymore, but she did once — she left that girl with him. 

I always wonder about the way memory works for us. It isn’t like a perfect roll of film that records every moment of your past in a neat little package that you can revisit whenever.

Mostly what remains of our most important memories, the ones that touch us deeply, are just fragmented images that come to you in flashes — sometimes as faint as the ink on an old restaurant bill.

The image of your best friend waving out the car window as you leave the city; the look on your teacher’s face as she announces your grades; the sand on the concrete pavement when you slipped and fell headfirst while chasing your sister. 

Celine Song manages to capture this exact characteristic of memory through her filmmaking. The haunting scene where 12-year-old Nora and Hae Sang part ways on the last day of school comes back in later frames of the film – in flashes, just like it would in their own memory. The silence that rests between them when Nora says her family is moving to Canada is echoed in the silence years later when Hae Sang is leaving New York and she’s seeing him off. It is a silence that’s pregnant with the kind of love that only erupts at separation, when you’re so overwhelmed that all you’re able to croak out is a “see you, then” before you leave. When you know that years later all that will remain of this is an image of that person in that moment standing on that street, seared into your brain forever.

Past Lives (dir. Celine Song, 2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13238346/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk