Best films of 2023 in the UK: No 1 – Past Lives

Slowly and quietly this year, the film Past Lives from Korean-Canadian dramatist and director Celine Song, has been working its discreet magic. Pretty much every new audience member has been turned into a convert, recommending it to a handful more who joined this film’s growing congregation of fans that can hardly describe the spell it has cast over our hearts. This is partly a deeply romantic and sad movie about lost love and missed chances. It’s also a kind of reverie about alternative existences, and what-if life paths. And this is a more urgent question for first- and second-generation immigrant communities in the US. They may well, as they grow into their 30s and 40s, consider the question: what if I had stayed behind? Who even am I?

Related: Celine Song on adapting her life for surprise hit Past Lives: ‘It becomes its own story’

Greta Lee plays Nora, an elegant young Korean-born woman who has come to New York City and is now a budding literary star. She is married to a white American: Arthur, played by John Magaro, who is himself a promising young novelist. But this is, as the late Princess Diana might have said, a rather crowded marriage – for the most innocent reasons. Before Nora met Arthur she had reconnected via social media with her former childhood sweetheart who is still in the old country: Hae-sung (played in adulthood by Teo Yoo). Their Skype calls had had an urgency, an excitement, perhaps even a passion that neither could quite admit. And for Nora, switching out of English into Korean means an almost physical change.

Yet just as they were about to bring things to a crunch and arrange for Hae-sung to come over and meet up with Nora, she backed away, perhaps fearing that it was regressive. Song suggests that she is fatefully unwilling to let her exciting new American identity-career get sucked back into the past. So by the time Hae-sung finally gets to New York many years later, it is to see her while he is on vacation (the intercontinental equivalent of “I was just in the neighbourhood …”).

Nora is entirely committed to her new relationship. But she is deeply touched to see Hae-sung nonetheless, and their meeting has a new poignancy, a new depth in their shared knowledge of what might have been. And Song mischievously, even rather darkly, shows us that, as writers, Nora and Arthur can’t help seeing what a compelling character Hae-sung is: the humble man without Nora’s glamorous new public identity and aspirations, the modest soul who resigned himself to silent heartbreak. He has a kind of nobility that makes him greater than either of them.

Both Nora and Hae-sung are aware of the romantic Korean concept of In-yun: providence, fate and the reuniting of souls who knew each other in past lives. This airy concept has a concrete new reality in the digital 21st century. Their past lives were their childhoods, which might in other eras have been forgotten, but which now have a vivid reality in a world of instant data retrieval. Other film-makers might make irony or comedy or psycho-suspense out of the idea of hooking up with your old crushes on Facebook etc. Not Song. For this movie, it is the stuff of the most heartfelt love, the most profound self-questioning.

Past Lives takes its place among a number of fascinatingly diverse Asian movies about evaluating your identity in a western context: Lulu Wang’s bittersweet Chinese-American comedy The Farewell (2019), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s multiverse fantasy Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Davy Chou’s Korean adoptee drama Return to Seoul (2022) and Adele Lim’s wacky romp Joy Ride (2023). But Past Lives is greater than all of them because of its inspired, unforced simplicity and ease. The most complex emotions spring from the most uncomplicated filmic language.

Revisiting this movie now at the end of the year, I think what makes it so powerful is its portrayal of Nora and Hae-sung’s childhood. These scenes are not, as they might be in a different drama, a mere prologue or just glancingly important as a curtain-raiser: their inter-relationship as children as important as their connection as adults. These are their past lives and they live on into the present.