I missed an early screening of this movie and two of the critics that saw it told me it was one of the best movies of the year. I had seen the trailers and it looked good. It’s playwright/director Celine Song’s first movie, so I’ll try to be kind.
Things start off lovely, as we see a friendship between a boy and girl in South Korea. Both are the top of their class, and the girl admits to her mom that she has a crush on him. Mom arranges for them to have a playdate, since they’re going to immigrate to Canada soon. She wants her daughter to have some nice memories before they leave their homeland. The boy is crushed, and the way they simply say “bye” to each other is perfectly executed.
In her early 20s Nora (Greta Lee) moves to New York to try and make it as a writer. She reconnects with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) over the internet, and they start to fall in love. As a kid she said she’d marry him because he’s “manly” (which is cute coming from the mouth of a child). But, just as things are heating up online, she breaks it off, realizing the long distance relationship won’t work. Especially since neither of them has the time to fly and visit the other.
Nora marries another writer named Arthur (John Magaro). It’s been 12 years since she’s talked to Hae Sung, but he’s just out of a relationship and wants to fly to New York to visit.
When Arthur shows some insecurities about all this while they’re getting ready for bed, it’s terrific stuff. I wanted more moments like that. My big problem with this movie is that not enough happened, and once Hae Sung is in New York and with her, he comes off as a boring sad sack. Song needed to have more dialogue that was interesting and thought provoking. The audience should be conflicted about what we want to happen with this couple. Instead, I’m wondering what she ever saw in this guy. I’m also wondering why I even care about her, to be honest.
I usually hate when movies bookend things with the same scene, but it was brilliantly done here. We see the married couple, with Hae, at a bar talking at 4 a.m. We hear another couple speculating as to what’s going on, since the Caucasian is just sitting there looking like a bored, third wheel (this was inspired by the real thing happening with Song). So we know these three are going to end up somewhere together at the end, we just don’t know how it will end. And everything I liked and disliked in this movie, is in the final scene. When we see two people staring at each other for about 3 minutes while waiting for an Uber…just idiotic. No two adults just stand there looking at each other. Yet the scene of one person crying a few seconds later, is just incredible.
The film has a lot of compelling ways it could have gone, especially with the language barriers different characters deal with in different ways.
There was one scene I really enjoyed where we find out Nora is married and not just dating her fellow writer. They’re at customs and people seem to be getting testy with each other. I immediately thought about how we found out the couple was married and with a kid in “Life is Beautiful” and they come out of the greenhouse with a child after we see them entering for the first time they’re together. I also thought of the bittersweet ending of “La La Land,” which was done so much better in conveying how two people feel for each other, and how it breaks us to know they’ll never be together again. And of course, watching them on their “date” around New York, you can’t help but think about “Before Sunrise.” Yet that film actually had dialogue and conversation that made me realize why these two enjoyed being together. In “Past Lives” watching two people just stare at each other in front of a carousel or on a ferry, just isn’t enough. Even when he met another woman back in Korea, all he did was stare at her. Is that this dude's move? Just staring at women until they fall for him?
Another problem this movie has is we’ve all either been there, or have a good friend who has. They pine for that old romance from high school, and reconnect online. So Song needs to give us something more to root for here.
All the talk of “In Yun” in this is overdone. In Korean culture, it’s the idea that there’s a connection between people that can be built up over past lives, and that’s why they’re meeting again in this one. It’s cute when Nora first tells Arthur about it and has a throwaway line about “it’s just something Koreans say to seduce someone.” Yet by the third time it’s brought up, I was sick of hearing about it. It also made me think of a better movie (the also overrated) – “Everything Everywhere All At Once.”
It gets an extra star for using great songs from Cat Power, Them (Van Morrison), Leonard Cohen, John Lee Hooker, Grizzly Bear, and John Cale.
2 ½ stars out of 5, but…my wife loved it and would give it two stars more.