Greta Lee’s Past Lives Movie Review: A poignant movie about childhood love & lost chances

Childhood love is like moody mirages that keep popping up every now and then. Sometimes you need to make difficult choices in life and need to be ruled by the head and not the heart. Lionsgate’s Past Lives is all about that. Childhood loves are difficult to forget and first flames will always remain first flames. First love or crush or memories do not fade easily and they keep coming back to you like snap shots and there is a strange kind of yearning to go back to those days. Celine Song’s film debut, starring Greta Lee, shows two childhood friends who share a beautiful, unspoiled love across two decades and two continents. They met over skype after twelve years of searching, but finally both didn’t want to part with their roots and wanted to take a break. It is a story of love and regret and the constant thing that lingers in the mind of the two childhood lovers is ‘what if?’ [caption id=“attachment_13243822” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] A still from ‘Past Lives’[/caption] What if we would have tried a little harder to be with each other? When they met after twelve years of separation, he didn’t want to leave Seoul and she didn’t want to leave New York, the city she migrated to as a kid. It is this harsh thing about regret that it can kill you like gangrene and finally you have to go through complete amputation of that part of your life which is not only dear, but very special too. Going back to the story about Past Lives, it revolves around Nora (Greta Lee) and her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). The film shows how the two met in school in Seoul. Nora is shown to be a cry baby and she used to always vent out her anger and grief to Hae Sung. And Hae Sung was this cool, composed, patient man always soft with Nora. He is every woman’s desire and a very stable partner material who believes in the stoic philosophy of suppression of emotions. Nora who was called Na Young then, on the other hand was the competitive one who wants to be a winner all the time. There are some real sweet moments of childhood love, which brings out the characters of the two in a vivid way. There is a scene where Na Young or Nora tells her mother that, “I will probably marry him.’’ The true character traits come out of any particular character very early in life and it is very easy to catch those traits of a person early in life because they are unfiltered. This is one of those childhood scenes where Na Young is upset because Hae Sung scored more marks than her. But the kind uncompetitive person Hae Sung is, he doesn’t get annoyed by her behaviour and he is seen comforting her. There are a lot of things in the movie that are left unspoken and that is the brilliance of the filmmaker, Celine Song. The brilliance of the movie lies in the method of storytelling and Celine Song has completely nailed it. With no show of pomp and unnatural visuals and lovemaking scenes, the movie touches the heart of all. And many may feel that it is ‘my story’. With Korean dialogues used every now and then, there is nothing alien about the world of Hae Sung and Nora. Rating: 4 out of 5 Past Lives is showing on Lionsgate

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