Past Lives
Directed by Celine Song (PG-13) ★★★★ Onetime sweethearts wonder what might have been.
Past Lives opened in only a handful of theaters last week, yet it’s “without a doubt one of the best films of the year,” said Maxwell Rabb in Chicago Reader. An audience favorite at the Sundance Film Festival, Celine Song’s semiautobiographical debut feature “offers a momentous meditation on unfulfilled love that reaffirms the importance of people who come into and leave our lives.” Greta Lee and Teo Yoo play former childhood sweethearts Nora and Hae Sung, who were separated when Nora’s parents left South Korea but reunite in New York City 24 years later. By then, Nora is happily married. But instead of offering clichéd love-triangle drama, Past Lives “delivers a restrained, crushing reflection on longing and untapped possibility.” While both leads are fantastic, said Allegra Frank in The Daily Beast, “Yoo, in particular, is a standout,” communicating Hae
Sung’s deep-rooted affection for Nora in long silences and “expertly drawn, uncertain body language.” And though Song’s screenplay and directorial choices make it painfully clear that the two kindred spirits can’t pair up, given their life paths, “their potential to be together is so cinematically powerful as to render body-shaking sobs from a sensitive viewer.” John Magaro, who’s “one of the finest actors working in independent cinema,” pitches in by playing Nora’s understanding husband, said Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times. “You leave the movie grateful to have lived alongside these characters.” I also left marveling over a movie that’s “at once the loftiest and the most grounded love story I’ve seen in some time.”