Review: 'Past Lives' is one of the best movies of the year
Here is one of the best movies of the year, maybe the very best even though it's just June. The title is "Past Lives" and you only need to see it in a theater to fall helplessly under its spell. I first found this gem at Sundance five months ago and I still can't get it out of my head and heart.
The delicate, dazzling "Past Lives" defies blunt description. As someone once said in song, "How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?" It's a love story told over three time periods as a woman finds herself drawn to a man when she's, respectively, 12, 24 and 36 years old.
The creator of this one-of-a-kind miracle from A24, the studio behind this year's Oscar-winning "Everything Everywhere All at Once," is Celine Song, a playwright ("Endings") who's never directed a feature film before or even set foot on a movie set. Yet here she is, at 34, showing the artistry and assurance of a cinema virtuoso. Don't you love it when that happens?
Song carves "Past Lives" out of her own experience as a South Korean whose parents abruptly moved the family to Canada when she was 12. This is exactly what happens when Nora from Seoul says goodbye to Hae Sung, her childhood crush.
They don't reconnect until a dozen of years later when Nora -- the glorious Greta Lee -- finds Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) on Skype. They have to catch up on parents, past trauma and repressed memories that have left them divided by culture and a language that Nora, now a New Yorker, speaks mostly in her sleep.
Another division is more substantial. At an artists workshop, Nora meets, falls in love with and eventually marries sensitive, sweet-natured Arthur (John Magaro) an American author who's already had a novel published -- it's titled "Boner" -- and plays video games like a kid.
It hits Arthur hard when Nora tells him that Hae Sung is planning to visit her in New York. She tells her husband it's "in-yun," the Korean word for fate. Arthur, only half jokingly, tells Nora he feels like an outsider in her story, "the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny."
Nora kiddingly tells him to shut up -- "he's just this kid in my head for such a long time ... I miss him." Arthur knows it's more than that. Hae Sung is a part of Nora's childhood identity, a past life that doesn't disappear just because she's moved into adulthood.
Later, Arthur tells his wife, "It's like there's this whole place inside you where I can't go." But Song can, and she takes us there with a burst of of feeling that makes "Past Lives" unmissable and unforgettable as it catches Nora in the exhilarating act of becoming herself.
Song begins her intimate whisper of a film with a scene in a noisy New York bar where Nora, Arthur and Hae Sung are talking. We don't know them yet and we can't hear them. Only the voices of two strangers off-camera, speculating for fun about who they might be.
By the time Song returns to that scene near the end of her film we know the secret hearts of each one of them. Lee, Yoo and Magaro all deserve Oscar attention for their soul-deep performances. If you don't wipe away a tear at the end, get your vitals checked. "Past Lives," the finest film this year by a first-time director, will take a piece out of you.
