- Past Lives
- Written and directed by Celine Song
- Starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro
- Classification PG; 106 minutes
- Opens in theatres June 9
Critic’s Pick
The debut feature from Korean-Canadian director Celine Song, Past Lives pivots on the Buddhist-influenced Korean idea of “inyun,” or destined connection. Like karma, inyun builds up in layers both good and bad over the course of existence – enemies today might be the result of a rotten union hundreds of lives ago, while a strong marriage might only have come to fruition after layers of romantic inyun accumulated over millennia. In ways big and small, then, it seems appropriate to describe Past Lives as 8,000 layers or so of positive cinematic inyun for Song. This is a film containing oceans of truth, centuries of longing and vast feelings of open-hearted tenderness.
Loosely based on her own experiences, Song’s film begins in Korea, where a 12-year-old girl named Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) is preparing to move with her family to Canada. The straight-arrow student has even picked out a new name for herself, already anticipating the cultural shifts with a bursting reservoir of energy and naiveté that will soon be stripped from any young person. (She chooses “Nora,” a slight modification from her father’s old-school suggestion “Lenore.”)
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Nora is not only leaving her home but her best friend, Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim), a classmate who sparks her competitive edge, and also maybe something more that she cannot quite pin down yet. Watching the moment in which she tells her would-be sweetheart that she is exiting his life forever is akin to freeze-framing the exact moment a child loses their innocence – there is a wince, a gut punch, a million little pieces of hope extinguished in a second.
But this is not the end for Nora and Hae Sung, just as it isn’t their beginning, in the inyun sense of things. Jumping decades, Song’s film races past whatever Nora’s life might have looked like in Canada – all we get is a quick glimpse of the family arriving at customs – to find her struggling as a playwright in New York (and now played by Greta Lee). Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), meanwhile, is enduring compulsory military duty and thinking of the one who got away. Thanks to the internet, they reconnect online and find themselves almost exactly back where they were so many years ago.
Except life moves on, whether we want it to or not. Thanks to some missed connections and matters out of anyone’s control – or at least those characters’ desire to assert control – Nora and Hae Sung are now in their 30s and still not together. Nora is married to Arthur (John Magaro), a witty, warm author whom she met while on a writers’ retreat. She is on the cusp of creative success, and living a fulfilling life, by all accounts. So when Hae Sung finally crosses the ocean to visit Manhattan, what will he expect to find? And what could Nora possibly hope to offer him?
The quiet beauty of Song’s film is that she doesn’t pretend to have any answers. Life is messy, and destiny is ultimately unknowable.
As Song follows the unusual trio of Nora, Hae Sung and Arthur across one weekend in New York – each person carefully dancing around their own feelings, as concerned for the other as they are for themselves – the filmmaker builds a romantic drama in which audiences are just as invested in seeing two people kiss as they are in actively hoping they don’t do anything of the sort. Song is attempting a delicate balance of character and genre expectations here, and the wonderfully surprising thing is she pretty much pulls it off. All with a sense of kind humour that feels strong and even courageous, given how deeply the material is mined from Song’s own life.
Lee, best known for her comedic role on Netflix’s Russian Doll, doesn’t so much rule the screen as she fills every inch of it with a quiet, aching wistfulness that lingers. Yoo can be impressively stoic one moment, achingly fragile the next. And Magaro hits so many perfect notes as a man caught in the middle that you wonder whether the actor has found himself in this exact situation before.
The handful of scenes in which Nora, Hae Sung and Arthur all occupy the same space – an awkward moment of introductions in a tiny Manhattan kitchen, a just-bordering-on-flirty round of drinks at a hip bar – produce some of the most skin-prickling, all-too-real performances that I’ve seen in ages.
Past Lives is not an unfailingly perfect film. The raves coming out of its Sundance premiere in January were understandable but they cruise past the fact that Song lets some of the early Korea-set scenes hang in the air, while her second act feels just a degree or two rushed, defensible given how strongly the last third lands. But the movie is still a rare thing: honest, intimate, lasting.
If it took centuries’ worth of inyun to make Past Lives, then it was well worth the wait.