Director: Celina Song
Usually, I don’t watch Korean movies that much. But as many as I have seen, all of them were good. I remember watching “Windstruck” when I was just passed my school. I remember “My Sassy Girl”, “The Classic”, and “A Moment to Remember” all of which I watched during that amazing period of my life. If I have to say one thing about Korean movies maybe I would go for the ‘softness’. Recently I watched another Korean movie, and as usual this time also I went out with an amazing emotional experience. So let’s talk about the movie “Past Lives”.
What is life meant for? Is time the most important thing that we have in life? Or the memories we create in Between time? There are several stages of life. In each stage, we have individual types of lives, not because of our choices but because we are developing as a human over time. We humans are not made of perfection, we regret the decisions we made in the past, we regret the life we live in the present but Isn’t that the beauty of life?
Past Lives is about the first love between two childhood friends, who separate from each other in childhood and meet again after 24 years.
Nora(Greta Lee) and Hae Sung(Teo Yoo) are two childhood best friends, living in Seul, Korea. Nora’s mother is an artist and her father is a playwright. She immigrated with her parents to New York when she was 12 years old pursuing a better career opportunities. After 12 years these two childhood friends reconnect again through Skype. They share or not how they missed each other in those 12 years. Hae sung from Seul and Nora from New York connect for some time in this period. Then again they separate for the sake of Nora, for the sake of her career, for the sake of life.
After 12 more years, in New York, Hae Sung and Nora finally met in person with each other after 24 years. When Nora is married to an American guy and Hae Sung is stable in life.
The character Hae Sung is easy to read, he surely loves Nora whom he used to call Na Young in childhood. On the other hand, Nora, with vague feelings, is hard to summarize. Though from both of them, throughout the whole movie, there’s no such clear reference as who loves who or not. Nora has seen with such complex feelings and Hae Sung, the guy who tries to find his childhood Na Young in Nora.
The last scene says something vaguely about Nora’s feelings. The narration of the character Nora lies in the last scene, I think. The movie shows us how our past lives matter to us, and how it doesn’t. The sweet soft texture with such strong feelings of this movie is beautiful, just like our lives.
In a Nutshell
A complicated love relationship story, yet so simple.