Past Loves - Past Lives

I hate watching movies now because my emotional state is too fragile to leave unimpacted. So if you, like I, now have the emotional wearwithall of piece of rice paper, this film may leave you in shambles. There are moments when I was Watching Past Lives, where I could literally feel my heart break, and not in a hyperbolic literary way. As in, the evocation of a heart breaking was so poignant and palpable that my body literally re-simulated the feeling of having my heart broken. And this happened not once, but several times throughout watching this film.

At core, Past Lives is a love story between three people, two past lovers, two current lovers, and in a small way. The third relationship which is touched upon briefly technically occurs between two men on opposite sides of the same woman, one behind her in the past and one in the present. Woven around these three characters is a central question of space and time. How do these forces shape how love finds us, how it lingers and sustains? And in these spaces the film create we find ourselves, surrounded in what ifs? What if one thing were different , would it be our love that prevails? If we met at a different time, would we be able to make it work? Are we soulmates ? Could it have been us? In these gaps, the movie is able to fill us with a deep longing. Its brilliant use of pacing, drawing moments out carefully and slowly give us a feeling of heaviness, allowing for a heftiness to take form in the gaps. The silence is meaningful and heavy, in a way that evokes a sense of grief. If grief is love with no place to go, we feel that deep love weighing itself in the silence between two people, who because of the time and space, never quite express fully the thing between them. Although, it is known. In long pauses between Nora and Hae-Sung. In the slow speech of Nora's husband, detailing out the beauty of the Nora and Hae-Sung's love story. And in Nora's last few minutes with Hae-Sung, the silence and longing is so palpable that we sit in the audience anxious with anticipation.

But the love between these two characters is what is masterfully said, without being said. The silence, which holds the yearslong love and admiration for one another, is understood. Without the relief of them ever saying the words of every physically expressing their affection for another, much like the main characters we are left with this longing for a resolution that can never come in the way we'd want. It's a special kind of pain between two people who love each other deeply and simply cannot be. It is devastating and heartbreaking in a way I've never quite experienced before. As we simultaneously root for love to prevail, we know in a way that it can not in the way we want it too.

With an hour and half run-time, Past Lives draws out each minute weaving together a work that is ultimately beautiful, visceral, and gut-wrenchingly devastating.