Past Lives: Saving The Best A24 Film For Last?

In-Yun: noun; the idea that interactions between two people in this life are owed to interactions in their past lives.

I can say with certainty after watching it for the first time today that Celine Song's and A24's 2023 romantic drama "Past Lives" is the single best film I have ever seen put out by the studio to date. Yes, it's better than Everything Everywhere All At Once, last year's best picture winner, as outlandish as that may sound, despite being Song's debut feature. And so I figured what better way to end my A24 marathon than this, by talking about a movie that really made a heck of an impact on me? Yes, I am ending my A24 series that I've been working on for the last week-and-a-half on this blog. It was fun and gave me a reason to post obsessively and repeatedly, but all good things must come to an end, and I need to go back and watch more bad, uninspired, and anti-artistic movies so I can complain about them some more. And yes, I know I promised that I would go watch Twisters at some point, and I don't know how long it will be until I get to it. The family wants to go watch Inside Out 2 with me instead, and after seeing initial reactions to it from critics and audiences alike, I don't have too many qualms about the idea. I promise I will get the Twisters review out at some point though. Anyways, back to Past Lives and my ninth and final A24 marathon blog post. This movie is beyond incredible. That's the short and the how of it, and if you stick with me, I can give you the nuts and bolts as to the why. But first, the spoiler-free synopsis.

Past Lives is a largely Korean-language drama that follows a man named Hae Sung and a woman named Nora, two childhood sweethearts from South Korea (the not-crazy one). As the two of them get older, Nora and her family immigrate to New York, and as the years pass, and the two of them are grown up, Hae Sung eventually decides to go to America to reunite with Nora, and the two of them are forced to confront the life-changing decisions that they both made for themselves.

I think that a lot of movies like to maintain some manner of emotional distance from their characters, and I can't help but wonder if this is because writers are afraid to put themselves through emotional turmoil while writing their screenplays, and so they erect as many walls as they can between themselves and their characters. Well, for as many bland and emotionless (or worse, forcedly emotional) movies get made today, I like it when a film is willing to be emotionally honest and emotionally raw. Not melodramatic, but honest. Because that means that the writers of the film were themselves willing to be emotionally honest and emotionally raw. Past Lives is one of the very best examples of utilizing and leveraging emotions against the audience that I've ever seen put to screen, and Song and Co. accomplish this feat of emotional honesty by letting their film be immensely personal, even with the details of Nora and Hae Sung's lives that might not matter to the casual viewer. This movie makes us want what Nora and Hae Sung want because it's so thorough, detailed, and tender in demonstrating what exactly it is that our two main characters want. I described it as "immaculate focus" in my notes on the film, and by keeping this immaculate focus centered squarely on the lives of our two main characters, Past Lives achieves an emotional intimacy that I have rarely seen in any other film, past or present.

This movie's sense of visual storytelling is incredibly strong. The dialogue in Past Lives is minimal, and the film prefers to use recurring and surprising visual cues to open a window into the lives of Hae Sung and Nora that is a little wider than anything expositional dialogue could give us. I think that part of what helps this visual storytelling along its way is this film's insistence on telling a familiar story in a new way. Past Lives is a classic story about the familiar situation of the love triangle, except it decides to complicate things by making sure that two of the characters in the triangle are, uh, married. Yeah, Nora's married to a guy named John. I didn't mention that earlier, did I? Small spoiler merely for illustration's sake, I promise. Well, what helps this love triangle along on it's merry way, and what largely prevents it from falling into any stereotypical pitfalls, is that John is actually a decent guy. Sure, he's not perfect, but there's no glaring flaw to him that would give Nora any reason to jump ship. The two of them are in a loving and stable marriage, and the only person really complicating things here is Hae Sung. It's a unique twist on a problem that we see in a lot of movies and really adds a lot of emotional stakes to this whole film. And as far as emotional stakes in Past Lives go, the intensely small scope of this story makes every single move and decision our characters make feel absolutely immense. Remember when I said that this movie makes us care about what these characters care about? It becomes very complicated very quickly when they start caring about each other. Sure, the stakes of this movie might not be the fate of the universe as we know it, but you can tell that the filmmakers behind Past Lives really cared about making the problems in this movie seem big, so they do. They do feel big. Bigger than anything Thanos and all of his infinity stones could conjure up. Because they're relatable. When a character has a problem or a triumph, you feel it, because you have most likely intimately felt those same problems and those same triumphs in your own life at some point. This is the power of small-scale storytelling, it's something that Hollywood's forgotten, and thankfully, it's also something that Past Lives remembered.

I'm not much of a romantic. Being romantic feels somewhat foreign to me. I'm not the guy who jumps from relationship to relationship. But every human desires to feel loved, and Past Lives tenderly and earnestly nudges at that want that's innate to every human heart. On a purely biological scale, sure, these feelings are part of how we further the human race. But I think that, sadly, a lot of people in our culture have lowered the idea of romance, love, and sex to their lowest common denominator. And so I think it's nice to get an emotionally honest film like Past Lives that doesn't do that. Sure, it's a movie that might make us sometimes root for the end of an on-screen marriage that is perfectly healthy, but I think that the connotations go a lot deeper than that, and I don't want to make merely surface-level observations, especially not when I'm trying to be sentimental. This movie made me feel good. It made me feel conflicted. It sometimes made me feel sad. Feelings don't come as easily to me when I'm watching a movie anymore, especially now that I watch so, so many of them. And so I think it's pretty special when they do. This movie is a smart one. It's a well-crafted one. But it's also an emotional one, and while it is thankfully subtle, and never falls into the habit of being melodramatic, it also lets itself be vulnerable and honest about what it's trying to do for us, the viewers. A million of my own memories came flooding back to me as I was watching this movie, and I imagine that it was the same for a lot of other people, and could be the same for you. Past Lives is the complete package, containing a well-paced story, phenomenally written and engaging characters, and emotional beats arising from a well-written story that will probably resonate with just about anyone on a pretty deep and vulnerable level.

I can't recommend Past Lives highly enough. I would consider it to be essential viewing as well as A24's best film, and I sincerely hope that you will take or make the time to give it a watch.

Past Lives - 10/10

Romans 13:10