Echoes Across Time: Navigating Love, Loss, and Destiny in Past Lives
By Daniela Cordovez Flores
"You dream in a language I can't understand. It's like there's this whole place inside you I can't go," says Arthur to his wife, Nora, in Celine Song’s Past Lives (2023). Arthur loves Nora deeply, but parts of her remain inaccessible to him—something he learns all too well when Nora’s childhood sweetheart from South Korea, Hae Sung, visits them in New York. Over the course of their reunion, it becomes heart-wrenchingly evident that Nora and Hae Sung are the epitome of the phrase “right person, wrong time.” But this film interrogates and deepens the breezy rom-com trope of rekindling an old flame; not every fantasy is that easy in reality. Both Hae Sung and Arthur are central to Nora’s life, but to very different phases of it—there are parts of Nora that only Hae Sung, and not Arthur, can even begin to access, and vice versa. Questions, spoken and unspoken, are littered throughout the film: if we cannot translate our innermost selves to someone else, does that mean the connection once shared is bound to flicker out? What happens to the love that was there? Are time and love forever at odds? When does love itself simply stop being enough?
Past Lives is a love story, but also so much more. It’s a slow-burn, bittersweet tale about the passage of time and the scars that nostalgia leaves in its wake. The film inquires about the existence of soulmates and reminds us of what Song once called “that feeling that somebody from your past or somebody from your present can make who you are so vivid and contrary but true.”
The film resonated resoundingly with audiences immediately upon release, but this should not be a surprise to anyone—it’s a film truly rooted in the human experience. After all, the story told is one that not only can happen but has happened in real life; more specifically, to Song herself. Past Lives follows dedicated writer Nora Moon (Greta Lee) as she is forced to confront how her life and the people in it have changed over time. Nora was born in Korea, where she met her best friend and childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). However, when her family moved to Canada when she was twelve, Nora had no way of contacting Hae Sung, so the two best friends moved on separate paths for 24 years—that is, until their (perhaps unexpected) reunion.
Watching Nora and Hae Sung’s closeness as children, it is hard, even painful, to imagine them growing up to lead entirely separate lives. There is a sense that regardless of what either Nora or Hae Sung may be doing, their connection remains untouched, still alive somewhere in their past, an attachment that couldn’t be discarded even as Nora found love with someone else. It’s hard not to want their story to resume once we watch them come face-to-face once more—to yearn for that connection stored in the past to manifest between them now as the people they have become. But at the same time, after growing to appreciate the effort both Nora and her partner Arthur (who is poignantly performed by John Magaro) put into their relationship, the observer feels sorry for even considering that Nora and Hae Sung may be a better match.
The film is often anachronistic in nature, as it weaves together three different timelines: Nora and Hae Sung’s childhood lives up to the last time they saw each other in South Korea, Hae Sung’s adult life in Korea, and Nora’s present life as a writer in New York with Arthur. The latter two timelines eventually merge and take the audience to the present when Hae Sung flies to New York and stays with the couple. These frequent leaps between different storylines slowly reveal the importance of ‘time’ as a force that transports characters along distinct and definitive paths, turning the narrative itself into a time-woven quilt. Time leads the observer through cheerful clips of the past before immediately following them with the characters’ present, giving the audience answers that are perhaps different from what they were hoping for—and sometimes crucially withholding those answers until later in the film. Faced with the knowledge that scenes of the past have already concluded and the separation between Hae Sung and Nora has already happened, the audience often feels at the mercy of time, essentially making time itself the unspoken antagonist.
Hae Sung and Nora may not have the benefit of time, but they share a language, a culture, a childhood—how could Arthur try to match this level of intimacy, even as Nora’s present husband? Song’s film emphasizes an enduring belief about human relationships: the in-yun. It is the belief in providence that interactions between people in the present are due to interactions—perhaps tiny and unnoticeable—in their past lives. When an in-yun is layered 8,000 times between two people, they are destined to live happily ever after. The way Nora and Hae Sung maintain a connection through time and distance poetically proposes the possibility that their in-yun has survived other lives, just like it is surviving this one. This precarious setup—a husband, a wife, and the wife’s childhood best friend who is in love with her—brings the complexity of in-yun to the forefront. Should we judge this interaction as inappropriate and complicated, or does its nature exceed society’s traditional norms on monogamous relationships? Can we even judge Nora and Hae Sung’s connection if it feels so intensely fated?
This, however, is the quiet heartbreak of the film: although Nora loves Hae Sung as a part of her past, especially as one she never truly got closure for, her current reality does make her happy. That’s where Past Lives distinguishes itself from other “blast-from-the-past” romance stories—nothing is as black-and-white as the trope of reuniting with “the one that got away” often requires things to be. Song’s storytelling is mature and nuanced, subverting expectations of cliché, over-sensationalized, or romanticized endings. Nora accepts this connection with Hae Sung as a love—a genuine one—but one that is not meant to be, at least not in this life. After a silent final frame, where Nora and Hae Sung wait for the latter’s ride to the airport, Hae Sung asks, “What if this is a past life as well, and we are already something else to each other in our next life?” He opens the car door and says, “See you then.”
Bittersweetness can rarely be intense enough to be described as gut-wrenching, but Past Lives challenges those norms with an ending so agonizing it truly does feel like a punch to the gut. Celine Song’s film is so painfully human and real that it feels impossible not to think back on one’s own “would’ve been”s, one’s own heartbreaks at the hands of time. Far too often, we consume romantic films and can sense that they are made up, too good to be true stories. Amid our fast-paced environment, we frequently jump through chapters in our lives without pause, always looking ahead without observing, without reflecting on the multiplicity of stories that make up our present selves. We need stories like Past Lives to acknowledge the futures that time silently stole away from us, and to prompt us to finally look beneath the band-aids covering past wounds and begin to mourn the colossal, indelible scars that remain from lives not lived, from paths not followed, from love not pursued. Our past lives remain imprinted on our skin and deep in our bones, and only once we allow ourselves to feel them can we possibly begin to heal.
