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Feb 17, 2024 Divya Bharat

Oscar Bait is The Point’s series of conversations about films nominated for the Academy Award for best picture. Today, Christopher Orr, an editor in Opinion and a former film critic, discusses “Past Lives” with Rollin Hu, an Opinion researcher.

Christopher Orr, an editor in Opinion

“Past Lives,” the intimate romantic drama by the writer-director Celine Song, ought to be my kind of film. I was an enormous booster of “Once,” a film that’s somewhat similar, back in the day. But “Past Lives” left me a bit underwhelmed.

Before I get into why, though, you’ve described “Past Lives” to me as a “multiverse movie.” I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to hear more.

Rollin Hu, researcher

I thought the best multiverse movie of last year was going to be “Across the Spider-Verse,” a beautifully animated piece of comic book action. But then I saw “Past Lives.”

Nora (the movie’s main character, played by Greta Lee) gets whisked away from a budding childhood romance in South Korea by parents looking to start a new life in Canada. This is the split in her multiverse timeline. She eventually finds love and success in the United States, but she’s haunted by a parallel universe when her crush-turned-hunk comes to visit her.

Christopher Orr

There was a 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow movie called “Sliding Doors” on precisely this path-not-taken theme, but you probably missed it because you were too busy being born or the like.

Rollin Hu

Did they have films in color back then?

Christopher Orr

Touché!

Rollin Hu

But from what I know about “Sliding Doors,” the split in the timeline happened if Paltrow caught the subway. It’s a matter of chance. But in “Past Lives,” it’s more deliberate.

The film’s main meditation is on how one’s relationships are defined by inyeon, which Nora translates from Korean as “providence or fate.” It may have been fate for Nora to meet her American husband, but they chose to be together. The film’s characters may resign themselves to this timeline because of inyeon, but inyeon is realized by their choices.

It’s this confusion over blaming fate or personal agency that bursts at Nora’s cathartic sobbing when Hae Sung (Nora’s childhood crush, played by Teo Yoo) leaves at the end. Brutal.

Christopher Orr

It was a powerful ending. My modest disappointment with the film was the way it kept restating its premise — Nora and Hae Sung were separated as children but keep being drawn to each other — to the exclusion of almost anything else. Virtually every conversation between the two of them is about their quasi-relationship. They don’t talk about work or movies, tell each other jokes or even seem to much enjoy one another’s company.

If that’s inyeon, they sure don’t make it look much fun.

Rollin Hu

I saw the fixation on their quasi-relationship as the filmmaker trying to cautiously glimpse an alternative timeline where Nora didn’t immigrate, while pushing back against a common takeaway from immigration narratives — that assimilation is an unalloyed happy ending. “Past Lives” lingers on the idea that there might be something lost, too.

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