Past Lives is gut-wrenching, and terrifying — it’s perfect

By Sriman Narayanan

Near the end of the first act of 2023’s Past Lives, a shot in Celine Song’s directorial debut pulled a breath out of me, and for almost all of the remainder of the film’s brief, procedural, silently theatrical runtime, I was left struggling to find it again. 

The shot in question: childhood sweethearts Hae Sung and Na Young, positioned left to right, are seen, from behind, ascending one of Seoul’s steeply-arched streets. Hae Sung wears blue, Na Young red, we don’t see their faces.

I’d seen the same shot before; in a film two decades older; set in a neighboring country; and rendered, unlike Song’s gorgeous 35mm, in animation. Studio Ghibli’s Whisper of the Heart also follows two kids, and they too fall into young, unquestioned love. About an hour into Whisper of the Heart, the two leads ascend a steeply-arched road in Tokyo, violin-maker Seiji on the left in blue, budding novelist Shizuku on the right in red, and we don’t see their faces. 

For a film so interested in memory — how it bends conception of truth, and oneself — I want to believe that Song has seen, loved, and been deeply affected by Whisper of the Heart. It’s the only film Yoshifumi Kondō ever made for Ghibli, has earned cult fandom over the years in Ghibli’s passionate fanbase, and, if I were to continue to twist the end of my tinfoil hat, I would like to imagine Song’s obsession with memory in Past Lives comes from the wistfulness, the nostalgic Romanticism of Whisper of the Heart; after all, the Ghibli film centers on a writing and rewriting of the most hoaky, sentimental song ever written (Country Roads).

But if that is the case, Past Lives is also a significant departure from that elder text, because Past Lives refuses to blind itself to reach sentimentality like the Ghibli film. Song’s movie flies in a few conflicts, most visibly a love triangle between Hae Sung, Na Young, and Arthur, Na Young’s eventual husband. It is the validity of sentimentality, though, that becomes the struggle to strike hardest by the film’s close.

Past Lives concerns itself with artists — Na Young’s a playwright, Arthur a novelist, they meet at a writer’s retreat in Montauk — who are inherently concerned with this problem, too: does it make sense to write amidst life? To seek romance? To sit still in it, while the past travels to the future? 

Some of these scenes aren’t dramatic, but gut-wrenching the more so. Na Young lays in bed with Arthur, who says of their life, “Our story’s just so boring.” Past Lives contains three people coming to terms with what their life is not. Greta Lee’s spellbinding performance as Na Young reaches its climax in her final, tearful collapse into Arthur’s arms, but Arthur’s climax is in this same scene as his admission. Na Young says, “This is where I ended up. This is where I’m supposed to be.” But those are contradictory statements, the first is the truth, the second is a consolation for Arthur, who is starting to understand all the same truths at the same time. He knows, now, that his life is not the romance that his novels may detail. It’s not even the romance that he is afraid Na Young and Hae Sung have. It seems like Na Young already knows all of this, that she’s intellectually understood the truth of her life’s mundanity. But it’s not until she finally lets Hae Sung go does she feel it. 

This movie is gorgeous. It’s shot on that grainy A24 filmstock that has become synonymous with an insistence on grasping for grandeur in a world that has made the truth of the world’s obvious mundanity, its hopelessness, more accessible than ever before. In response, we ask to believe in romance, and seek out the films that seem to promise it. The films in recent memory that wear a similar coat — Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name, Moonlight, The Whale, Aftersun, Little Women — leave its viewers with something to hold onto (hint: it’s always hope). But I don’t leave Past Lives with hope, I leave it being seen, which might be a hope in itself. I don’t feel that way, though. I leave being confronted with a quiet terror, with the truths of my emotions that have been marred by a film’s deep observation into me. Past Lives is perfectly now, and perfectly terrifying, and perfect.