Road to the Oscars Review: ‘Past Lives’ is an Understated Romance, and a Bit of a Slog

Every year, in the time between when the Oscar nominations are announced and the actual Oscars ceremony is held, OFM movie reviewer and associate editor Julie River tries to watch all the movies nominated for best picture that year. In the years since the pandemic, this has become easier, as a lot of the movies are now on streaming.

So far, she hasn’t made it through all of the nominees since the category expanded from five nominees to as many as 10, but this year, she intends to pull it off and write reviews of each movie as she goes through them. She already saw and reviewed American Fiction as part of the Denver Film Festival, and she already saw Barbie, and it was reviewed by fellow OFM writer Ivy Owens. OFM writer Owen Swallow also already reviewed Poor Things. That leaves seven movies for her to watch and review. Can she make it through all 10? Find out on OFM’s Road to the Oscars!

Rating: 84/100

Playwright Celine Song has managed two Oscar nominations for her directorial debut Past Lives: Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. That’s a pretty huge honor for a first time out. The semi-autobiographical film tells the story of two friends, Nora Moon aka Na Young (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who live in Seoul, South Korea. The pair, as young children, develop a crush on each other, but Nora’s family’s choice to emigrate to Canada cuts the ties between them until they find each other 12 years later when Nora is living in New York, and then reconnect again 12 years after that. But, by the time the two of them are reunited in person, 24 years after being separated in childhood, Nora is now happily married to her husband Arthur (John Magaro). The two childhood friends contemplate the nature of their relationship and what could have been had things unfolded differently.

A lot of critics have praised this movie for its restraint, and it certainly deserves praise for that. The movie resists every rom-com trope possible and avoids the big, romantic ending that viewers have come to expect from romantic films, even while pointing out in the dialogue what the more obvious ending should be. Yet, that restraint is also what makes it a bit of a difficult slog to sit through. Despite being the second shortest of the Best Picture nominated films (Zone of Interest is shorter by only a minute), it still feels like a much longer movie. That restraint is great in theory, but, if you have ADHD, trying to sit through one hour and 45 minutes of people with feelings for each other not hooking up is a challenge. Certainly not the same kind of challenge as, say, Zone of Interest, which was brutal to sit through, but this one definitely dragged a bit.

But with restraint being the name of the game, the two lead actors put in stellar performances. It takes a lot to be able to convey that emotional connection without anything physical happening between the characters. That physicality that’s present in so many romantic movies makes that emotion so much easier to convey. But Past Lives forsakes that in favor of a longing and yearning that isn’t fulfilled, making for a significant acting challenge.

Despite its two nominations, the Vegas odds don’t give Past Lives a very good chance of winning anything at all. Past Lives and Maestro are basically tied for being the least likely to win Best Picture, and the odds have it as third most likely to win Best Original Screenplay behind The Holdovers and Anatomy of a Fall. In this case, the old fallback phrase “It’s an honor just to be nominated” holds true because, while it will probably come away from the ceremony empty handed, the fact that Song’s directorial debut—and her first script for film ever—was even nominated is a huge deal. It means that there’s probably big things in Song’s future, and she may be destined for an Oscar some day. It just won’t be this year.

Past Lives is currently streaming on Paramount+.

Photo courtesy of A24