Much is made of representation in the media for gays, women, POC, et cetera but you don't hear about it so much when it comes to interracial couples. And it's not like I can't think of examples in film: Anna Deavere Smith and Bill Irwin in Rachel Getting Married; Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard. Neither of those movies explored the relationships in racial terms, however. The ones that do — Loving, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner — often do so to the exclusion of everything else. Which makes Past Lives something special. For while the relationship between playwright Nora (Greta Lee) and her husband Arthur (John Magaro) isn't the central story, writer-director Celine Song does take the time to show the frictional sparks, related to the cultural divide as experienced by this married couple.
But Past Lives is much more than that. Something akin to a parable about what happens when your childhood crush (Teo Yoo) reappears in your life not once (digitally) but twice (the latter, in person). As you might guess, the results are poignant, passionate, and ultimately painful. For confronting the past (which inevitably contains the dreams of youth, and a look at our earlier, less corrupted selves) isn't easy. Any adult, whose done the internal work, isn't going to throw everything over to try to recapture what never came to be. But there's a cost that comes with this maturity, one which Past Lives details exquisitely.
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