Review: Past Lives

Director:  Celine Song

Stars:  Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro

A cynical person might look at the approaching Past Lives and recognise all the tell-tale signs of a middle-class indie darling. Festival buzz. A trailer that suggests furtive, curtailed romance and wistful big city wandering. A surefire place on David Ehrlich’s end of year video countdown. All of those things are almost certainly true of Past Lives, and yet in the watching they don’t mean anything. Celine Song’s thoughtful feature debut sort of shimmers into being in front of you. At first comforting, then later dazzling. But all the while it feels guileless, free of any urge to pander or placate. An honest poem.

Song – no stranger to dramatic construction having cut her teeth in theatre – presents to us a tale of longing, of time passing and time frozen, and the acute diaspora of the immigrant. It begins, generously enough, with us. The audience. We’re sat across the bar from three adults. Two Koreans who talk passionately. One white man, left out of the conversation. Who are these people? One, the woman in the middle, Nora (Greta Lee), catches us looking and returns our gaze, making connection, bridging the barrier.

Song takes us back 24 years. Quite the jump, across time and space. So much life and history to traverse. Young Nora (Moon Seung-a) and her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Yim Seung-min) are adorable 10-year olds together, their bond soon to be severed as Nora’s parents move her to the States. Inexorably their lives flow in different directions. Jump 12 years, however, and a lonesome and nostalgic Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) tracks Nora down for a lightly potent Skype reunion. They talk for hours. Til midnight. Nora forgets to eat. In spite of varying distances there’s a retained simpatico. But if you think this is the makings of a predictable romance you’re wrong. Nora – a budding author – goes on a writer’s retreat in New York where she cohabits by happenstance with Arthur (John Magaro). Another jolt of 12 years and the two are married. They’re happy. And Hae Sung, newly single, is coming to America to visit…

The first half of Past Lives sails like a boat on water carried by the current, buoyed in no small way by the music of Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen, which envelopes the fluid edits of the piece, making it glide. This balms us through scenes of characters in their quietude, observed in separation from one another. In isolation. Here the way technology has engendered communication and contact comes to the fore. But if the world seems more connected and therefore smaller because of it, Past Lives acutely understands that reunion often creates the opposite sensation. We’re a good hour into the film before Nora and Hae Sung are together again, face to face. And in that moment Song is able to communicate how large the world feels. How immense, busy and populated. And it only increases the sense of intimacy between her studies. Their micro drama is so focused, so thought-out that all the world around them are mere extras in this story.

This sense of space is echoed in the typeface for the film, which separates the words of the title out across the screen, emphasising themes of distance. It’s wryly amusing to watch Nora ramble rhapsodically to her worried husband Arthur about the differences she can catalogue between her sense of Koreanness and the perception of being Korean she sees in her unchanged friend from so long ago. Song uses this scene to tumble through the dissonance of coming unmoored from the culture of your home, teetering on the brink of Nora’s lightly feathered sense of imposter-syndrome (which is dwarfed by Hae Sung’s institutionalised sense of self-worth, or lack there-of).

If Nora’s perception of Hae Sung is cagily frozen-in-time, his of her is resolutely fixed, even crystallised, maybe even calcified. His journey to visit her is clearly an overture of love and devotion, but devotion to an image he has held and codified over decades. We’ve all done it in the throws of a crush; imagined an unknown person and unwittingly tailored them to all of our preferences. Hae Sung’s version of Nora is rooted in memory, but it is just as porous, dissolvable, clouded over with his own nostalgia. Bringing each other back into clarity reveals the diaspora of romances. Makes both of them recognise the bittersweet differences between past and present, between the real and the imagined.

Past Lives is so richly written as to keep the viewer swerving and engrossed. And it is no coincidence that that dreamy score almost completely vanishes in the film’s second half. Flipping things, Song uses its absence to subtly ratchet the tension of how this will play out. How far will she tip into melodrama? How much of a Sophie’s Choice will the third act be? While it is knowing in this regard, it isn’t played as such. Song commits to the reality she has constructed with some of the most beautifully naturalistic dialogue exchanges I can recall having the pleasure to witness.

After a whirlwind day reuniting with Hae Sung, Nora goes home to sweet, nebbish Arthur and we’re inclined to hope that she’ll leave him for the fairy tale of happiness that’s washed up on the shores of the Delaware for her. So what does Song do? She casually swings the pendulum the other way with one of the most disarmingly intimate bedroom conversations between a married couple in years. Talk about toying with your audience. It is the deftest of divine torture.

All of which is to rhapsodically say that this is an all-timer, folks. As much as it is an instant calling card for Song as a player on the cinematic field, it is the same for her glowing leads, particularly the effervescent Lee, who deserves all the gongs going six months from now. Casting directors Ellen Chenoweth and Susanne Scheel have excelled themselves here. The comingling chemistry between these three is really something, and each plays their respective notes to perfection. Past Lives isn’t a tearjerker. That’s too forceful a notion. Perhaps its a tearcharmer; coaxing or conjuring such responses from its too-truthful well of emotion. Beautifully – but not preciously – framed, this one will leave you ruminating on the connections in your own life. Losses. Missed opportunities and the fatalism that comes with those. But also the decisions you knew – then and now – were the only ones you could make, and the solace that brings.