Quote:
"By skipping over Nora's teenage and early adult years [in Past Lives], [Celine] Song elides a lot of details and short-circuits a lot of potential immigrant-experience clichés. Beyond an occasional phone chat with her mom (Ji Hye Yoon), Nora's family is seldom in the picture; they're part of her life, but they don't define it. And apart from a later scene in which she acknowledges a not-uncommon sense of East-West cultural bifurcation, that identity confusion never becomes an obvious source of drama in itself. Refreshingly, Song doesn't turn Nora into a mouthpiece for anyone's experience but the character's own."
-- Justin Chang

Source:
Chang, Justin. "Review: Spanning continents and decades, 'Past Lives' is a love story for all time." Review of Past Lives. Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2023.