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| Teo Yoo, Greta Lee and John Magaro in Past Lives. |
One of the most familiar tropes in sci-fi and fantasy narratives – especially recently – is the existence of multiple existences in different dimensions that echo each other but don’t replicate them. (That is, of course, the premise of the delectable animated Spider-Verse franchise.) In Past Lives, the debut film by Celine Song, those echoes are meant to suggest lives the characters have already led but don’t remember; layered on each other through time, they create a ghostly pyramid that leads us toward the coupling fate intended for us. After Maestro and the Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, Past Lives was my favorite movie last year. It’s not like anything else I’ve ever seen. Song was born in South Korea but her family emigrated to Canada when she was still a little girl, and as an adult she emigrated again, this time to New York, where she is a playwright and now a screenwriter and director. Past Lives is based on her own story, and the idea for it came out of an extraordinary moment when she sat in a Manhattan bar flanked by her white American husband and her Korean childhood sweetheart.