Movie Review: Past Lives

 

Michael's Movie Grade: A+

Director/writer Celine Song's feature film debut proves her to be a force to be reckoned with. 

This film centers around two childhood friends (Greta Lee, Teo Yoo), who had major crushes on each other. One of them moved to the U.S. and one stayed living in Korea. Years later as adults the two end up reconnecting. This storyline sounds like your typical practicable romantic movie. However, it is anything but. This movie never goes in the direction a lesser filmmaker would take it in. Instead, this film becomes something much more intimate, powerful, personal and thought provoking. Nothing here feels false or anything less than completely natural. Because of this, we forget that we are watching a movie and instead feel like we are getting a peak as other people are living their lives. Though there is sentiment here, the film never gets washed down in this sentiment and the sentiment feels like it is naturally flowing from the story and characters. We feel every moment of awkwardness, every moment of happiness, every moment of confusion, every moment of pain and every moment of complete and utter contentment. We are not only watch these characters live their lives, but we are also living it with them. As well as being a very emotionally powerful story, this is also a very thought-provoking piece of cinema. Rather than being a film about a romance, this is a movie that examines what love really is. It looks at if a romantic love, is the same thing as an attraction or a very deep friendship. Most importantly though it looks at how much of a role fate plays in love. This film makes you look at how various circumstances and events affect who these characters are and what their relationships to each other are. It makes you see how drastically different things would be if the circumstances were different. With the conversations in the film about past lives and what the characters' relationships were to each other, in those possible past lives, only accentuates this idea and causes us to look at our lives and wonder if there was some hand of fate in our lives and if we would even be the same person if we had a different life. This self-examination the film causes us to have doesn't even have to be limited to the romantic part of our lives. There are so many beautiful things about this movie and these things do not leave you when you leave the theater, instead they stay with you long after. 

A film like this is something truly special and this is one of those movies you leave knowing that it is destined to go down in history as a classic.