The First Great Film of 2023: Past Lives
" Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. " (1) At the end of Celine Song's remarkable film Past Lives , Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) wonders if he and Na, now Nora, Young (Greta Lee, who deserves a Best Actress nomination right now) are together in a future at this very moment. A running thread throughout the story is very much about the roads we go down, the relationships we start but never quite conclude, and the paths not taken. Song takes the Korean term inyeon/ 인연 as the thematic underpinning that provides layer upon layer of tension between the possibilities of the past faded into the actuality of the present. Inyeon is translated as "encounter" but it has more nuance than that might imply(2). As Nora explains it to her husband Arthur (a beautifully sensitive John Magaro), the word relies on context; in a past life, two people may have brushed sleeves in passing, but something's been estab...