This heart-meltingly romantic and sad movie from Korean-Canadian dramatist and film-maker Celine Song left me wrung out and empty and weirdly euphoric, as if I’d lived through an 18-month affair in the course of an hour and three-quarters. How extraordinary to think that this is Song’s feature debut. It’s delicate, sophisticated and yet also somehow simple, direct, even verging on the cheesy. Past Lives has been compared to the movies of Richard Linklater, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig; all true, but I also found myself remembering the wrenching final moments of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, with Tony Leung murmuring his pain into a stone hollow in Angkor Wat and – yes – the gooey genius of Dean Friedman’s plaintive 1978 chart hit Lucky Stars.
This is a story of lost love and childhood crush, the painful and dangerous access to the past given by digital media; the roads not taken, the lives not led, the futile luxury of regret. And it’s a movie that speaks to the migrant experience and the way this creates lifelong alternative realities in the mind: the self that could have stayed behind in the old country, versus the one that went abroad for a new future. In this it is similar to the frantic, Oscar-winning multiverse comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, though I think better and truer.
