Past Lives takes place in our current world, current year. A world in which films such as Celine and Julie Go Boating and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind both exist and the film even references. They tell stories about fate, unreality, the subconscious - that in the metaphysics of our world there are some souls who are destined to be together, bound by an inexorable destiny. Logic in our more and more secular world tells us that none of that really exists, but a part of us yearns for that romanticism that makes life so much heavier, so much more intense.
But then it becomes: limerence or lust? destiny or coincidence? Past Lives takes place in as close to the real world a romance film can get, one in which all of the characters understand these films and reference the Korean concept of inyun in a way that tugs between rejecting and embracing the concept.