![]() ![]() Neither of them know what’s going to happen next. Every sightseeing excursion and catch-up exchange feels loaded. ![]() Hae is finally making good on his promise to visit New York, for “vacation.” They’ll be in the same city for the first time in decades, and Nora offers to play tour guide. They live an ideal bohemian life in the Lower East Side. Nora is now a playwright, happily married to a writer ( John Magaro) she met at a retreat in Montauk. It’s about to get complicated.īecause when Past Lives throws you into the last part of its triptych story, another dozen years have passed and the stakes have become so much higher. Beware of that romantic glow you feel, however. There’s such a pitch-perfect, oft-kilter rhythm to all of this, not to mention the joy of watching two people slowly fall for each other a second time - especially when Grizzly Bear members Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen’s score lays the swooning string section over everything just right. You can see this middle section working as a one-act onstage, even with the intimacy of a rekindled puppy-love spark being played out on computer screens. Only the names and the outcomes change, which makes the movie’s chronicle of what happens this time around that much more moving.Ī playwright by trade, Song has a talent for letting things be left unsaid, and letting characters express themselves through unfinished sentences, casual asides, and glances every hesitation and pause suggest short stories unto themselves. (“I think it’s Buddhist?” Nora says at one point.) This gently exhilarating, heartbreaking drama gives you the sense that so much of this has happened before, and will happen again. Past Lives is fixated on “In-Yun,” a Korean concept that suggests people consistently weaving in and out of each other’s worlds over different centuries, different existences. Maybe, in some alternate universe or ancient timeline, these three experienced all of the unseen patrons’ scenarios. She knows the answer, but she’s not telling. The woman - her name is Nora Moon - finally looks at the camera and gives us a Mona Lisa smile. The camera creeps toward the woman sitting between these men, as the voices keep lobbying alt-histories back and forth. No, the other replies, the lady and the white guy are a couple, and the Korean gent is their old friend. The two Koreans are tourists, one of them says, and the white guy sitting to their left is their guide. wheel of intrigue had been set in motion and. Folks off-frame are making up possible back stories. It finds that Buddhism espouses many ecological and social values conducive to a sustainable philosophy of life. ![]() We’re observing the trio from a distance, unable to hear what they’re saying. Past Lives, writer-director Celine Song’s debut feature, opens with a guessing game: There are three people sitting at a bar, drinking in the wee hours. ![]()
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