How Can You Love Me Now As You Had Said You Loved Me Yesterday?: A Review of Celine Song’s Past Lives (2023)
Last summer, I watched what I believed to be one of the best films to come out of the year 2023. In her directorial debut, Korean-Canadian playwright, Celine Song captures an interesting perspective on how love and identity can transform over the course of a person’s life. Past Lives , follows a young Korean playwright – based loosely off Song herself – as she is confronted with having to choose between a love from her past and the love from her present, and asks audiences to consider the forms in which love shapes, breaks, and re-shapes us back into the people we have become and will continue to become as we grow old. The film’s plot is grounded by one evocative question: does the love sparked within a past version of who we once were exist long enough within us to be re-ignited? Past Lives does well to answer this question through the concept of In-Yun , an ancient Buddhist concept which states that interactions between two people throughout their current lives are rewar...