When the trailer for Celine Song’s Past Lives dropped in the middle of winter, it seemed to tease a tearjerker for the ages, with a love triangle that featured two reunited childhood sweethearts from Korea and the American man she ended up marrying. A kind of The Notebook for the A24 set. Over Cat Power’s cover of Rihanna’s “Stay,” we see glimpses that suggest a star-crossed love, spanning continents and timelines, grappling with fate and magical thinking.
That turned out to be a red herring. The actual Past Lives is much less grand but also more grounded, foregoing outsized emotions in favor of something quieter, understated. Instead, the most heartbreaking thing about the film is the heartbreak of saying goodbye to infinite possibilities, of mourning all the lives you could’ve lived. The story’s power rests in the idea that while building a life is often difficult and not always exciting, it’s also one of the bravest things one might do.
Past Lives centers around Nora (played by Greta Lee), a Korean playwright who immigrates twice to make it to New York and finds herself on the cusp of a promising career, with an American writer husband Arthur (John Magaro) to share her dreams with. With all of that ahead of her though, she finds herself looking back on life in Seoul and her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who she reunited with through Skype and Facebook.
Since its premiere at Sundance, and over its theatrical run (it’s now available on VOD), the film has garnered rapturous reviews, announced “a miraculous film” by Vox and “almost assuredly predestined to be the single best movie you see this year” by Rolling Stone.
One of the key passages of the film is when Nora explains the Korean concept of inyun to Arthur, when they initially meet: “It means providence or fate,” she says. “But it’s specifically about relationships between people… It’s an inyun if two strangers even walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8,000 layers of inyun, over 8,000 lifetimes.”
Past Lives is a movie obsessed with fate, the potential magic in everyday interactions, the possibilities of magical thinking. But in Nora’s journey, the film seems to suggest that the greatest, most breathtaking romance we might hope to have is the one we have with our own life. In an age where we’re doomed to browse through the lives of others, to constantly fantasize about infinite possibilities and impossibilities, the biggest heartbreak might be the realization of a long road behind you, of paths chosen and commitments made, that conspire to make life feel narrower but maybe also more grounded, more real.
That hard won acceptance is foregrounded by the dreams the young Nora articulates when we first meet her in Korea, then going by her Korean name Na Young. “Koreans don’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature,” she tells her classmates, as a way of explaining why her family was moving to Canada. Later, when she and Hae Sung reconnect in their 20s, Nora talks about aspiring for a Pulitzer. Twelve years after that, when they finally reunite in person in their mid 30s, she settles for aspiring for a Tony—still a long shot but already a dream right-sized by reality. To live the life you’re living is to grapple with the fact that that might mean a life that’s ordinary but also deeply your own.
We never hear Cat Power’s cover of “Stay” in Past Lives. Instead, the song that welcomes viewers into the movie is Leonard Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” a cut off the classic 1967 album Songs of Leonard Cohen. “Let’s not talk of love or chains and things we can’t untie,” Cohen sings. “Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.” Past Lives similarly reveals the emptiness of fantasizing about magical fixes, reminding us about the beauty in a life lived presently.
At a crucial moment in the film, Nora’s husband voices out his insecurities about their love story’s relative mundanity, when compared to the potentially extraordinary narrative if Nora were to reunite with her childhood sweetheart. “What if you met somebody else at that residency?” he asks her. “Our story’s just so boring. We met at an artist residency, slept together because we both happened to be single. We realized we both live in New York so we moved in together so we could save on rent. We got married so you could get a green card.”
But the best stories don’t always make the best realities. “That’s not how life works,” she reminds him. “This is my life and I’m living it with you.”