But when I rewatched the film, which is up for best picture on Sunday, I realized it’s a smarter movie than that, and truer to life as well. The broad premise of “Past Lives” may be “who will she choose?” but the reason it’s an affecting experience is not that it’s concerned with abolishing tropes or righting representational wrongs. Instead, it’s a story about three good people, trying to do right by one another, fumbling, faltering but finding their way through.
For Nora, the only fitting choice in the end is her husband, Arthur, not because he is (or isn’t) white but because he is the right choice for her. To run off with Hae Sung — whether he’s Asian or not — would not have made any sense given what we learn about her character and relationship. Reflexively rooting for that to happen made no sense for me, either.
I have my own “Past Lives” moment, sort of. I first met my boyfriend in 1996 at a party thrown by mutual friends from college. We went on one horrible date — I take responsibility; being dense, I didn’t realize it was a date and kept whining about some clown who had just dumped me — and both decided we wanted nothing more to do with each other. Unexpectedly, 26 years later, in late 2022, I had to interview him in my role as a journalist. Reacquainted, we hit it off.
Why did things click this time and not previously? As Heraclitus wrote, you can’t step in the same river twice. To me, that’s the real lesson of “Past Lives”: We have to move forward, not back. As Nora ends up saying to Hae Sung, referencing her Korean name, Na Young, and her new home, New York: “The Na Young you remember doesn’t exist here.” When she chooses to stay with Arthur, she explains it by saying, “This is where I ended up.”
It might sound like a blowoff, but, in the film, it’s a deep and moving declaration of commitment. It’s also a moment that felt deeply authentic to me. The first time I watched the film, I worried that someone’s feelings would be crushed, maybe mine. But when I left the theater with my boyfriend, I didn’t feel heartbroken at all.
