2023's Most Beautiful Movie About Love

This video is brought to you by AdamandEve.com.  Use my code LSOO for 50% off 1 item + Free Shipping in US & Canada Who do you think they are to each other? This is the question that opens Past Lives,  the first feature movie by Celine Song, as we follow a voyeuristic gaze at three strangers  sitting across the bar. They won’t, of course, be strangers for long. Soon, we will learn  exactly who they are and how their lives are intertwined. And yet, the question remains  significant. For it tells

us that whatever expectations we might have, things will not  be as they appear at first sight. Indeed, Past Lives is a movie that goes on to quietly  yet significantly subvert many tropes of the romantic genre, but it also reconstructs them into  something new, something that I wasn’t expecting, and which to me, elevates it to one of, if not  the most beautiful love story in a long time. Past Lives can be roughly divided into three  chapters: in the first one we meet Nora and Hae Sung as adoles

cent kids in Korea harboring  a secret crush on each other. The young romance, however, isn’t allowed to blossom as Nora’s  family emigrates to Canada. 12 years pass. In this second chapter of the story, Nora is now  a playwright in New York, Hae Sung still lives in Korea. The two reconnect over the internet,  but Nora becomes increasingly worried about her growing intimacy with a person who only exists on  her laptop screen. And so, she hits the brakes, and the two fall out of each other’s live

s  again. Another 12 years pass. Now we move into the main portion of the story. Hae Sung goes on  a vacation to New York where, for the first time in over 20 years, he meets up with Nora who is  now married to an American novelist named Arthur. Do you know you only speak in  Korean when you talk in your sleep? At this point, you might expect, as I initially  did, a story in which the main conflict, both with regards to the internal struggle of the central  character as well as to the direction

of the plot, is primarily driven by doubt. Did Nora make the  right choice by marrying Arthur, or would Hae Sung have been the better option? Who does she love  more? Who is she going to end up with? You know, it’s the path as laid out by movies such as  Before Sunset, in which two former lovers meet again after not having seen each other for  9 years, prompting a re-evaluation of their life choices that eventually culminates into a new  crossroad, a new moment of decision-making. And more speci

fically, it presents a new chance to  make the right choice. Because if you had seen the previous movie Before Sunrise, you already  knew these two have great chemistry, and seeing how they are still so great together years  later while also learning how unfulfilled their lives have been without each other, the movie  almost naturally creates this sense of destiny, this feeling that these two, despite having  been momentarily kept apart by circumstance, are just meant to be together. I was just

thinking about what a good story this is. Childhood sweethearts  who reconnect 20 years later only to realize they were meant for each other. Past Lives, on the other hand, subverts this expectation by  deliberately calling attention to it. In the story, I would be the evil white  American husband standing in the way of destiny. Shut up. It does this not to display how meta-aware it is about the tropes of the  genre, but to emphasize that this is a different kind of story, with a different focus

, and with  a different tension. Indeed, though presenting us with what appears to be a love triangle that will  eventually favor the two characters who have the more beautiful story and therefore have fate, and  the audience on their side, at no point is there any real suspense that this might actually happen,  that there is going to be another grand moment of choice. Nora makes it very clear, both to Arthur  and to us in the audience, that there is no way that she would run off with Hae Sung.

Do you even know me? I'm not gonna miss my rehearsals for some dude. And so, when Nora and Hae Sung finally reunite, there just isn’t that same atmosphere  as there is in Before Sunset, there isn’t that same gravitational pull that  has us yearning for these childhood lovers to actually upset their lives and be together. And yet, there clearly is a strong emotion here, a feeling of bittersweet melancholy that does feel  adjacent to words like doubt, longing or regret, but none of these truly see

m to capture what Past  Lives is trying to articulate. Doubt is generally seen as a form of worrying, you know; worrying  whether or not you made a correct decision. It’s about weighing options in terms of right and  wrong, like; would Nora have been happier if her family never moved out of Korea, would a life  with Hae Sun have been more fulfilling? Which also feeds into that underlying assumption of destiny  or fate, the idea that there was a better path, a right path out there that we may hav

e  missed, and that now fills us with regret. But while the movie allows its characters to ask  questions like these, allows them to wonder about what might have been, it feels like it also wants  to demonstrate just how limiting of a framework our language can be when trying to articulate  what it really feels like, what it really means, to look back on the choices that shaped our lives,  and to contemplate where we are and who we are in the present. It’s a deconstruction that begins by  consid

ering how our lives are not just directed by decisions that we made, but also, and maybe  even more so, by those that were made for us. I feel so not Korean when I'm with him.  But also, in some way, more Korean? In his review of the movie, Carlos Aguilar  draws attention to the implications of Nora’s childhood immigration. “There’s a unique emotional  displacement that happens to people who migrated when they were old enough to have forged memories  of life in their homeland but still young eno

ugh to be remolded by a new environment. As the years  mount, and you become someone else somewhere else, that previous existence, now so distant  from your current reality, begins to fade into a corner of your subconscious  covered in the cobwebs of nostalgia.” In this context, it becomes even clearer that  Nora’s reunion with Hae Sung is not about the future, he doesn’t re-enter her life as a  potential new direction for her to go in. Instead, he’s more of a bridge to the past, one that  unden

iable rekindled a part of Nora’s history and identity that had been dormant for many  years, but also one that affirmed just how estranged she has become from it. He's so Korean. I mean, I have Korean friends, but he's not, like,  Korean-American. He's Korean-Korean. By emphasizing the definitiveness of time; the way  it solidified Nora’s past into a part of her being that she will always carry with her, while also  grounding her so firmly in her current existence that she can never truly return

to it, Past  Lives becomes less about what could have been, even less so about what should have been, and more  about how what is came to be, about how it defined who we are, and about reconciling ourselves with  the way time eventually narrows down the boundless potential for possible life directions into a  concrete and singular reality. And while there is definitely some element of grief involved  in becoming aware of this movement, and in the inevitable contemplation of all the lives that 

weren’t lived, all the places that weren’t stayed in, and all the connections that were broken, as  critic Richard Lawson wrote, “Past Lives is not concerned with regret. It is instead a thoughtful,  humane rumination on what may be fixed in personal history but remains forever fluid in the mind.” You dream in a language that I can't understand. It's like there's this whole place  inside of you where I can't go. It’s essentially a search for meaning,  for understanding. Perhaps even, for justifi

cation. One that can be  defined by replacing ‘what if’ for ‘why’; Why is it that we are who we are? Why  aren’t we someone else, somewhere else, and with somebody else? It’s questions like these  that go beyond that imagining or that longing for what we might have missed out on, and also relate  to feelings of insecurity about what we did end up with. For what does it really mean, as Arthur  seems to wonder at one point, to have something if the only the reason you have it is because of  a seri

es of arbitrary circumstances that may as well have gone in an entirely different direction. What if you met somebody else at that residency? What if there was another writer from New York  who had also read all the same books you had, wouldn't you be laying here with him? That’s not how life works. It does seem to take the romance out of the  love story a little bit, the idea that our relationships are primarily defined by random  chance, that one tiny alteration in our past could have prevente

d us from even meeting those who  we now can’t imagine living without. And perhaps even more confronting, the realization that this  alternative life wouldn’t have been meaningfully different. That our loved ones would have just  met other people, made different connections, fallen in love, and lived out their lives with  someone else, never even knowing we existed. It makes it only natural that we worry about  what this means for our current relationships, and that we start to experience those

more ‘what  if’ kind of doubts that we talked about earlier. It's just that you make my life so much bigger.  And I'm wondering if I do the same thing for you. You do. This is where we ended up.  This is where I'm supposed to be. Here, the movie does something interesting by  seemingly re-introducing the idea of destiny, albeit its own version of destiny, presented  here as the Korean notion of In-Yun; It means "providence". Or... "fate". But it's  specifically about relationships between people

. In-Yun, as Nora explains it, suggests that every  encounter between people in their past lives, even if it’s just a moment of accidentally  brushing your clothes with a stranger, forms an In-Yun, a sort of spiritual connection.  These connections then accumulate over the ages, and when two people have acquired enough  of them, 8000 of them to be precise, that’s when they find each other, and that’s  when they can live happily ever after. At first glance, it definitely feels like it  brings bac

k some of the romanticism that got lost in the deconstruction of the pre-destined  love story, but at the same time, it also feels more nuanced, more retrospective than the kind  of destiny that explicitly or implicitly grabs us in the beginning and has us rooting for its  manifestation in the future. In Past Lives, the concept of In-Yun is not used to reach some kind  of definitive judgement, to either celebrate the achievement of destiny, or to mourn having missed  out on it. Instead, it’s mor

e about emphasizing the importance of reaching a sort of peaceful  resignation, the importance of acknowledging that anything could have been anything else,  while still finding closure in what actually is. The real reason why Past Lives stands out so much  to me personally, however, is because it doesn’t end with one idea taking over the other, it’s  not all dreamy nor is it fully grounded in stark realism. But instead it balances both of these  elements together as two sides of the same coin,

as two ways of reflecting on our lives and  ourselves that, as contradictory as they can be, somehow still come to simultaneously inhabit  our mind as we grow older. And as frustrating as it can be to find yourself caught between  romanticism and nihilism, between being aware that your life might be the way it is for totally  arbitrary reasons, and still having it mean the world to you, as the characters in Past Lives  demonstrate, there is a harmony to be found, as Richard Lawson put it, in tha

t beautiful  mingling of all of our wistful, pragmatic adult understanding, and that otherworldly sense  that we are all floating on the winds of fate. Lastly, I think it’s important to point  out that Past Lives is not just about the love story between Nora and Hae Sung, but is as  much, if not more so, about that between Nora and Arthur. Though being somewhat understated, there  is a quiet beauty in their mutual acceptance of the fact that we can never fully encapsulate those  closest to us, t

hat there will always be parts of them that we cannot access. But more importantly,  they also demonstrate how this doesn’t have to be an obstacle in our relationships, but can  actually be an path towards greater intimacy. Throughout the story, Arthur displays  a tremendous amount of support, open-mindedness and trust that enables Nora to  freely explore that unresolved part of herself existing outside of their relationship, and he  even accompanies her during that exploration. And this not onl

y allows Nora to  make peace with her past for herself, but it also brings it into her unity with  Arthur, makes him a part of that which was once inaccessible to him, leaving their  relationship stronger than ever before. You and me. Yeah. Yeah, you and I are In-Yun too. If, after all of this, you feel inspired  to grow closer with your partner, or just explore the world of love on your  own with an open mind and an open heart, I suggest heading over to Adam and Eve,  a company that, like Past

Lives, will for sure help you on your way to greater intimacy.  Remember to use my code LSOO for 50% off 1 item and to get free Shipping in the US and Canada,  and yeah, just go have a look, and have fun.