Past Lives, and the ache of the road not taken

Some films are about what happens. Past Lives is about what doesn't — the life two people might have lived, glimpsed across twenty years and a dinner table, and gently, devastatingly, set down.

Celine Song shoots New York like a city you could lose someone in. Nora and Hae Sung circle each other with the careful politeness of people who know exactly what they're not saying, and the film trusts a silence the way most films trust a swelling score.

If we live a life without ever wondering — is this it? — then we've lived a good one.

The Korean concept of in-yun — the providence that brings two people together across lifetimes — does the work a lesser film would hand to dialogue. It reframes longing as something almost cosmic, and then locates it entirely in two faces on a stoop at 4 a.m.

I left the cinema and didn't speak for an hour. It's the rare film that makes peace, rather than drama, the emotional climax.