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Past Lives follows the love and friendship story of Nora and Hae Sung who fall in "love" as children in South Korea until Nora's family moves to the United States and they lose touch. Years later, they find each other again and they have one of those beautiful and elusive "talk for 5 hours" kinds of relationships over Zoom. A modern "You've Got Mail" where they learn everything about each other and fall in love to the extent anyone can over Zoom. Eventually, they realize that their potential to be together is low given their distance, and they go their separate ways only wondering "what if." They pursue their separate lives and Nora marries a nice Jewish boy who she meets at a writer's retreat. They've been together for several years and their marriage is lovely and happy and comfortable. But Hae Sung is coming to town and wants to get to know Nora again, and her husband, who wonders if he is about to become the villain of this story, keeping these star crossed lovers apart.
I don't want to spoil the rest of the film because of how much reverence Celine Song, the film's writer and director, gives to each of these relationships, but what I will say is that in every Hollywood film, one of these relationships would be naturally positioned as unsatisfying, unworthy, deeming the other a more worthy choice, a clearer winner, the one to root for. This film asks the question, can many paths be good and worthy and important and the task of maturity is still in picking one? Song's brilliant writing makes the nuance of reality so much more engaging than film tropes, and the only injustice is that Greta Lee was not nominated for Lead Actress. Watch this film, you'll see that her day is coming.
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