Past Lives (2023)TE.01

A few weeks ago, I was so bored that I started scrolling through TV channels, looking for something anything to watch. I remember thinking about how there are thousands of movies out there, yet somehow it still feels like there is nothing worth watching. Then I came across a movie called Past Lives. I had never heard of it before, and honestly, I expected it to be one of those slow, boring movies that I would watch for twenty minutes before giving up.

I was completely wrong.

Past Lives starts in a very simple way. We meet two children, a girl and a boy, walking together down a staircase. The girl is upset because the boy has beaten her in a match. When he notices that she is sad, instead of simply walking away, he stops and stays with her. Eventually, they continue walking together before going their separate ways.

It is such a small moment, but somehow it tells us everything we need to know about their relationship. There is something innocent about the way they care about each other as children. They don’t fully understand what their relationship means yet. They are simply two people who enjoy being around each other.

As the movie continues, we get to watch their relationship change as they grow older. At first, they see each other almost every day. Then everything changes when the girl moves with her family to another country. Suddenly, the person who was once a normal part of her everyday life is thousands of miles away.

And that part really made me think.

Sometimes, you don’t realize that a moment is important until it has already become a memory. When you’re a child, you assume that the people around you will always be there. You don’t think about the possibility that one day you’ll wake up and realize that someone who used to be part of your everyday life has become a stranger living somewhere on the other side of the world.

Years pass, and the two reconnect. They begin talking again, and the feelings and memories they thought they had left behind slowly return. But the movie never makes it feel as simple as they still love each other, so they should be together.

Instead, it asks a much more complicated question

What if?

What if they had never been separated? What if she had never moved away? What if they had grown up together? What if they had made different choices?

And maybe the hardest question of all what if the life you are living now isn’t the only life you could have had?

That’s what I found so beautiful about Past Lives. The movie isn’t really trying to tell us that one choice was right and another was wrong. It is about all the lives that exist inside us the people we could have become, the relationships we could have had, and the paths we could have taken.

There is something painful about realizing that you can genuinely care about someone and still not end up with them. Sometimes two people can be important to each other without being meant to stay together forever. And I think the movie understands that in a way that feels very real.

It also made me think about how strange time is. Someone can be one of the most important people in your life at one point, disappear for years, and then suddenly return and somehow, a part of you still remembers exactly who they were.

That’s probably why Past Lives reminded me so much of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is one of my favorite movies. They are very different films, but they both explore something I really love in stories the connection between love, memory, time, and regret. They both make you wonder whether it is better to have loved someone and lost them, or to have never experienced that connection at all.

But what makes Past Lives especially powerful is how quiet it is. It doesn’t need huge dramatic moments or constant emotional scenes to make you feel something. A look between two characters can say more than an entire conversation. Sometimes the characters aren’t even saying what they are thinking, but you can feel everything that they are leaving unsaid. And I think that’s what stayed with me after the movie ended.

I wasn’t necessarily sad. It was more like this strange, bittersweet feeling. Almost like the movie had reminded me of people from my own life people I used to know, people I used to talk to every day, and people who I might never see again. It made me wonder how many past lives we all carry with us without realizing it.

Maybe there is a version of me somewhere in another life who made different choices. Maybe there are people I would have become close to if circumstances had been different. Maybe somewhere, there is an entire version of my life that I will never know anything about.

And that’s what I loved about the movie. It doesn’t give you a simple answer to the question of  what if? Instead, it leaves you sitting with the question yourself. By the time the credits started rolling, I realized that I had gone into the movie expecting to be bored, and somehow I ended up thinking about it long after it was over. And honestly, that’s probably one of the best things a movie can do.