LGM Film Club, Part 425: Past Lives

I just loved Celine Song’s debut film from last year. Widely acclaimed, one can easily see why. Two young Koreans have a crush on each other. But her family of artists immigrates to Canada when they are 12. Years later, she is a writer in New York and he is an engineer in Seoul working a whatever job in the kind of typical Korean worklife situtation that is basically terrible, even if he’s probably well paid. He’s never gotten over her. Twelve years past and they connect on the internet, using period appropriate questionable technologies (it’s hard to overstate the Zoom revolution compared with the horrible video conferencing apps of the past, which most of us were using before about April 2020). He is clearly into her still bigtime and she’s kinda into him too, but then she breaks it off since there’s no hope. Fast forward another 12 years, she’s married to the nicest Jewish New Yorker writer imaginable (no Philip Roth with this character) and then he comes to New York and they finally spend some time together.

Some have called this a love story but that’s not right. It’s a what if story between two people who have a clear lifelong connection where there is no way that it will ever work out and neither of them even really want it to or try to make that happen. It’s a story about what is gained and lost by the immigrant experience (the basic plot line is Song’s own life story). It’s a story about the choices we make in our lives and how there could have been alternative choices but it’s done now and there’s no reason to regret them. Or maybe there is a reason to regret them, depending on which side of the relationship you are on. It’s just a story about people in the best way that a movie can be, the kind of thing that doesn’t have big explosions or plot twists but which reveal as much about life and the human experience as any piece of art can.