“Films should be voyeuristic,” Mike Leigh once opined. “What else is a film if you’re not snooping into somebody else’s lives?” Past Lives’ opening gambit makes the audience party to some unbridled people-watching unfolding in a New York bar. These unseen eavesdroppers are fascinated by the three’s-company dynamic of a trio of drinkers: an Asian woman, an Asian man, and a white guy. From across the room they try to unpick the structure of the group. Who knows who? Who, if anyone, is the third wheel? Of all the bars in all the towns in all the world, how did they end up walking into this one?
