"Past Lives"

    ☆☆☆☆☆ 

Past Lives is the first great movie of 2023, a film of enormous ambition and epic, sweeping scope that is determined to remain grounded. Writer-director Celine Song is taking on nothing less than an entire philosophical conceit, but narrowing it to one small, specific story. Its characters continually insist they are ordinary and nothing special, but this extraordinary film is special, indeed.

Its story is one we've seen countless times: Two characters in love are separated, only to reunite decades later. On the surface, Past Lives tells its story in a quiet, straightforward way—so quiet that its deliberate pacing once or twice threatens to backfire, though never does. The characters here are Nora and Hae Sung, who meet as children in South Korea, just before her parents emigrate to Canada. Twenty-four years later, Nora (Greta Lee) is married to Arthur (John Magaro) and living in New York, when Hae Sung (Teo Woo) comes to visit, a situation as emotionally fraught as it is beautiful.

Woven throughout, with breathtaking style, is a Korean philosophy of "in yun," a long-haul destiny that explains but does not determine why two people might meet. Nora and Hae Sung have maintained their relationship in on-and-off, long-distance style for decades, and it's nothing her husband doesn't know about. "The guy flew 13 hours on a plane to see you, I'm not going to tell you not to see him," he reasons. Yet there's something much deeper, something both he and we sense, even while Nora and Arthur have a strong, committed marriage. It's a film that breathes a sense of magic: The Way We Were crossed with Lost in Translation — with the mildest hint of some of the loveliest ideas from Everything Everywhere All at Once. Past Lives builds to long and exquisitely unpredictable closing scene, one as wondrous and remarkable as everything else in this small bit of cinematic beauty.

Viewed May 10, 2023 — AMC Burbank 6

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