Celine Song’s film debut, starring Greta Lee, follows two childhood friends who share a wistful kind of love across two decades and two continents.
“Past Lives” is a wistful what-if story about two people, the children they were and the adults they become. The movie follows them through the years and across assorted reunions, separations and continents as well as milestones momentous and ordinary. It’s a tale of friendship, love, regret and what it means to truly live here and now. In a sense it is a time-travel movie, because even as the two characters keep moving forward, they remain inexorably tethered to the past, which means it’s also a story about everyday life.
“Past Lives” centers on Nora (played as an adult by a terrific and subtle Greta Lee) and a boy named Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), though mostly it’s about her. The two first meet as schoolmates in their home city, Seoul. They’re charming — they’re children — and close. “He’s manly,” Nora, then called Na Young, tells her amused mother. “I will probably marry him.” Soon after the movie opens, the kids are walking home shoulder-to-shoulder, her eyes downcast. He’s received higher marks at school, which, in a portent of her later-life ambition, has upset her. Hae Sung comforts her because he’s a nice boy; he will become a nice man, but by then she will be long gone.
This is the filmmaking debut of the Korean-Canadian-American playwright Celine Song (“Endlings”), who also wrote the script. Its narrative shape is fairly familiar: It opens in the present and then flashes back 24 years to when Nora was a girl in pigtails whose family was about to immigrate to Canada. In unfussy, naturalistic scenes and with onscreen text that marks the passage of time, Song follows Nora and Hae Sung as they go their different ways and reunite online a dozen years later as young adults. After a brief virtual reunion, they part ways. Another 12 years pass and they reconnect a second time.
The movie’s modesty — its intimacy, human scale, humble locations and lack of visual oomph — is one of its strengths. The characters live in homes that are pleasant yet ordinary, the kind that you can imagine hanging out in, the kind you want to hang out in. There are few big, look-at-me details, though you might notice a poster for Jacques Rivette’s 1974 classic “Céline and Julie Go Boating” in Nora’s father’s home office in Seoul. Without making too much of this cinephile allusion, there’s a moment in the Rivette that does seem germane: “Your future is behind you,” one character says to another, which could serve as a tagline for this movie.
Song draws you into her characters’ worlds seamlessly. As “Past Lives” develops, she toggles between Nora and Hae Sung at home and out and about, lightly sketching in how their everyday lives have developed. Even so, Nora — and Lee’s delicately calibrated performance — remains the movie’s gravitational center. By the time Nora is in her 20s, she is living in New York and has become a playwright. On a whim, she looks up Hae Sung on Facebook and discovers that he’s still in South Korea and has also searched for her. The two are soon regularly video chatting until Nora decides she needs to commit to her life in New York.
These scenes of Nora and Hae Sung reconnecting are pleasant, partly because Lee and Yoo are both nice to spend time with. But as the days give way to one night after another, this interlude can also feel drifty and even a little innocuous, almost like filler. That’s partly because although Yoo is awfully nice to look at, and while Song continues to add in details about Hae Sung’s life in South Korea, the character never takes deep root in the story the way that Nora does. For much of it, he is effectively a ghostly figure, a beautiful specter on a laptop screen whose open face hides very little, including Hae Sung’s vulnerability and yearning.
All this feels as specific, intentional and meaningful as the sight of different lovers embracing all around Nora and Hae Sung when, another 12 years later, they finally reconnect in person in New York. By then, each has settled into their respective lives, have separate histories, have made different memories. They have distinct personalities and ways of taking up space, and each has had a serious relationship, Nora’s with her husband, Arthur (John Magaro, wonderful). Like Hae Sung, Arthur has a sweet, transparent face that hides little, including the hurt that Nora sometimes causes him, one difference being that he actually lives with her.
It’s important to Song’s overall design that one of the most crucial and extended sequences in “Past Lives” takes place not long after Nora breaks off with Hae Sung when they’re young adults. She’s rocked by their encounter, but she is soon en route to a writers retreat, an emblem of the horizons first glimpsed in her girlhood. Here, for the only time in the movie, Song lingers over a physical space, in this case a handsome, sunlit country house, a home. Nora lingers too in these rooms, and shortly after she settles in, another writer — Arthur — follows. Song stages and shoots his arrival from Nora’s room, the camera pointing through the open window as she lies asleep in her bed. She misses Arthur’s entrance, but soon after, Nora emerges from her room, awake in a present that — for the first time — feels like the future.
Past Lives
Rated PG-13. In English and Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
