You know that feeling when the credits roll and you still don’t get up? “Past Lives” had that effect on many of us.
If you’ve looking for similar films, try the 1996 Hong Kong movie “Comrades, Almost a Love Story,” available on Prime Video.
I watched this film years ago and categorized it as a romance. That reading still holds, but it’s so much more than “just a romance.”
Two strangers land in Hong Kong and start over.
The year is 1986. Li Xiaojun arrives from Wuxi with almost nothing and has a fiancée waiting for him back home. Li Qiao arrives from Guangzhou but tells everyone that she’s a local. She works three jobs and takes English classes at night, where she sits with other people figuring out how to survive, how to belong, and how to get ahead. She keeps her accent flat and her plans to herself.
The two meet at a McDonald’s, one of the places where young mainland arrivals can sit for hours, eat cheaply, then disappear into the crowd. They become friends. Then more than friends. Then less than friends.
At one point, the pair goes into business together selling cassette tapes of Teresa Teng, one of the defining voices of Chinese pop. They set up a stall at a night market but nothing sells. Buying that tape in Hong Kong at that moment would mark you as someone who came from the mainland, and no one wants that designation.
Li Qiao accepts the loss, cuts her hair, and moves on to the next thing.
Years pass. Money changes both Li Xiaojun and Li Qiao. They each leave Hong Kong separately l. Eventually, they meet again in New York.
What This Film Shares With Past Lives
Both films follow East Asian women who rewrite their backgrounds in new cities — and then keep rewriting.
Nora leaves Seoul at 12 because her parents decide to move. She leaves Toronto for New York because she wants to. Li Qiao leaves Guangzhou, then Hong Kong, and by the end of the film, she’s built (and abandoned) more than one version of herself.
Neither woman gets to keep everything.
That’s the shared thread here. Pieces of the protagonists remain on the road behind them, and both films are honest enough to show how this affects the protagonists.
Where the Films Differ
Li Qiao hides.
She flattens her voice, lies about her hometown, and creates a new version of herself that she thinks will allow her to succeed in Hong Kong. Her rewrite is her armor. Every new identity that she builds is a way to keep her previous persona out of sight.
She writes in English, argues in English, and builds a life in English, but Korean stays with her in her sleep. Arthur says that he can hear her speaking a language that he doesn’t understand. Korean stays Nora’s. The girl who left Seoul remains.
Where the Films Share Similarities
The protagonists of these films both speak the same sentence to a man from home. Li Qiao tells Xiaojun that neither of them came to Hong Kong for the other. Nora tells Hae Sung she immigrated twice to get where she was going. Both lines remind men that the protagonists’ moves were never about romantic love.
That honesty costs the characters. Nora’s marriage to Arthur is real, but her green card is real too, and the film unflinchingly puts both facts on display. Li Qiao runs the numbers on everything, but the arrangement that she ends up in is nothing that she wants. Love arrives in both films, carrying rent, visas, and unknown timing.
Neither film treats the love complications as tragic. Both films refuse to pretend that wanting someone is enough to keep two people in the same city.
That focus is where the “almost” comes into play. The men standing beside these women carry unlived people: the woman who stayed, the woman who took the other road, the woman who never had to learn a second language to be understood. The men are proof that these women exist somewhere but are never coming back.
Many of us can relate to these unlived lives. Someone in our families left and every generation after has lived next to the branch that stayed behind, the branch that contains the language, the town, and the name.
So if you loved “Past Lives,” try watching “Comrades, Almost a Love Story.” The films take place in two different countries, but both leave you wanting to stay in your seat.
