Past Lives (2023)
I should say at the outset that I am plainly the wrong audience for Past Lives, and I know it. That admission feels necessary before anything else, because what follows is going to read as a minority report on a film that a great many people I respect absolutely adore, and I want to be clear: the problem here is very probably me.
Celine Song's debut has been showered with praise, and at arm's length I can see exactly why. It is elegant, controlled, softly acted and unmistakably the work of a real film-maker. The story follows Nora and Hae Sung, childhood sweethearts in Seoul, parted by her family's emigration and then reunited, tentatively, across two decades and several time zones. It is a film about the roads we do not take and the pull of the life we might have led. On paper, that is the kind of premise I should find quietly devastating. On screen, I found it close to interminable.
My trouble is not the craft, which is near faultless. It is the wavelength. This is precisely the sort of hushed, talky, yearning romance that sends a great many viewers into raptures and leaves me quietly checking how much time is left. I had the identical problem with Richard Linklater's Before films. I found Before Sunset, beloved and garlanded as it is, similarly becalmed where everyone else seemed to find it profound. Past Lives operates in exactly that register: the dialogue is graceful but, to my ear, inert. The scenes are exquisitely composed and yet they stretch, the story drifting toward a conclusion you can chart from the opening stretch, the emotion signposted carefully but never quite landing with the force it promises.
It is not without rewards, even for a sceptic like me. The three leads underplay with real delicacy, never clutching at your sleeve, never pushing for the tear they have probably earned. And the soundtrack is quietly gorgeous. I could have gone on listening to it long after the images had stopped doing much for me. There is also something genuinely interesting in the film's central situation, a marriage on one side and a ghost of another life on the other, and Song handles its ethical complications with care and without melodrama. I appreciated that.
If you are after Korean cinema that grabs you by the collar from the off, I loved Memories of Murder (2003) and found The Handmaiden (2016) utterly gripping, though both are quite different beasts to this. Past Lives sits in a much quieter corner of the room, and for its devoted audience that quietness is clearly the whole point.
I take no pleasure in being the odd one out. I wanted to be moved, and I half suspect the fault is as much mine as the film's. But a review has to be truthful about the experience I actually had, and mine was two hours of admiring something from the outside while gently willing it to end. The filmmaking is real, the intentions are honourable and the emotion is genuine for those on its frequency. I just was not on it.
Two stars. Though if you love Past Lives as so many clearly do, please take my dissent with a hearty pinch of salt.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2026-08-17
Where to watch
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