3. Past Lives, dir. Celine Song
This hurts. I am in agony picking one movie over another for this Top 3. In a year I could be screaming at myself that I did not rank Past Lives No. 1 overall. Choices are brutal sometimes.
I love all the people in Past Lives. This movie is all about the crushing difficulty of choice when every option is good. This is a love triangle with one woman and two men, classic structure. That triangle is either a choice between two lives you could lead, or an attempt to win back the love of your life, or it is trying to keep a girl. In all cases, these are lovely, kindhearted people wanting to do the right thing. They are all struggling with the onset of middle age, and the realization that their lives now have more closed doors than open ones. Usually just living your life is not so brutally tragic, but Past Lives is a less fantastical Everything Everywhere All at Once. There is this understanding that in every moment, increasingly more branches are torn off from the lives you could have. Until your existence is a denuded tree, just the trunk, moving linearly in time towards the end. Maybe that twig is a very happy life. Hard to not to mourn the multiverse of lumber littering the ground around it though.
Past Lives begins with Na Young (Seung Ah Moon), a twelve-year-old Korean girl whose family immigrates to North America, separating her from Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim), a boy in her class she has a crush on. Na Young, eventually changes her name to more the English"Nora" (now played by Greta Lee) and becomes an author living in New York. Hae Sung grows up in Korea (now played by Teo Yoo), and reconnects with Nora twice, once on Skype in college, then again in the present day. In college, the realities of a long-distance relationship meant it could just never work, they could never meet in person. Instead Nora made a life with Arthur (John Magaro). The conflict of the movie is around Hae Sung taking a vacation to New York, "shooting his shot" as it were, one final time.
The man looks great in that button-up shirt and has a solid haircut. Tough call, Nora.
I have to say that Past Lives is probably the single-best directed movie of 2023. This is a gorgeous movie. There is a six-minute long take at the end of this movie all shot along a street in the Village for the final "confrontation". The moves with the block left and right, from Nora's front door and then back again. It is amazing they were able to get all this done, NYC was nice enough to play along with the drama. There are some really beautiful shots in all the places Past Lives was filmed. I love the playground they found for preteen Na Young and Hae Sung to have their "date". I have to go to this carousel they visit in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Celine Song frames awkward three-way conversations with our lead trio, across two languages, with both men barely able to understand each other, and it somehow all works. That takes an intense empathy for everybody involved. It is the kind of filmmaking you have to admire.
(Could maybe this have been solved with a three-way? Probably not, but I think it was worth a shot.)
This is an achingly sincere movie. Past Lives is shot immaculately and yet it is overwhelmed with emotion. It is full of long conversations with pregnant pauses, because these are all people who love each and love being around each other. And as long as this night, this one visit to a bar, or this one meandering excursion out to a pretty part of the East River continues, the difficult questions the story asks never needs to be answered. Nobody needs to cheat on each other in a love triangle, nobody needs to be the cad or the slut or the tyrant. Past Lives just has people together in a moment, and it is heartbreaking when the moment ends.
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