It’s a rare movie that settles, quietly, into some part of your own experiences and memories without a speck of narrative contrivance gumming up your response to the story on the screen.
“Past Lives” is that rarity — modest, I suppose, in scope and budget, yet expansive in its three-part, 24-year unfolding of a friendship that keeps coming back (as Irving Berlin put it) like a song. Writer-director Celine Song’s debut feature won’t work for everyone, because nothing good ever does. But for those in tune with what it’s saying and how it’s saying it, “Past Lives” is a present-tense gem that bodes extremely well for Song’s future.
Born in Korea, the filmmaker immigrated with her family to Canada when she was 12, then to New York City for graduate school in 2011. She wrote several plays, and early in the pandemic produced a widely admired online version of Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” “Past Lives” comes from her own life. Five years ago, Song’s childhood friend from Seoul visited her in New York, and a scene from that real-life circumstance — three adults, sitting in a Manhattan bar, late at night, the woman between her sort-of ex and her husband — serves as the enticing prologue of “Past Lives.”
It’s divided into three chronological sections, with Song’s interweave of flashbacks keeping things narratively intriguing for the audience. First, in Seoul, we meet 12-year-old Na Young (Moon Seung-ah) as a fiercely competitive student, her primary competition — and confidant and friend — being classmate Hae Sung (Leem Seung-min). Perhaps they will marry someday, Na determines. She thinks this taciturn boy is “manly,” and that is enough. Then her family moves to Toronto. The kids now have a hole of indeterminate size in their respective hearts, where their time together formerly resided.
Twelve years later, Na Young is now Nora, played by the superb Greta Lee of “The Morning Show” and “Russian Doll.” On her own in Manhattan, she Skypes with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), now also 24. A random Facebook check has brought the two of them together again, virtually. It’s something, but what? The distance, spanning two continents, allows for a kind of nervous, isolated closeness. Yet they are at once remnants of who they were 12 years earlier, and pencil sketches of the adults they will become.
“Past Lives” gets along just fine without any substantive surprises or reveals. The third section of the story arrives around the midpoint, with Nora 12 years later. She has met and married a fellow writer, Arthur (John Magaro),and they live in the East Village. Hae Sung travels to New York for a visit, to “rest, enjoy, have fun,” as he tells his skeptical friends over dinner back in Seoul. But “fun” isn’t what we see on his face; it’s more like a clenched brand of yearning, or romantic anticipation. Peace of mind, and of heart, remains a sometime thing until the rest of his story with Nora is written.
Lee builds the character of Nora carefully, grounding every moment in watchful perception and different degrees of patience. She’s not a “type” but simply a dimensional presence. Largely, this is a three-person tale. Though Yoo makes Hae Sung an astutely judged mixture of worrier and dreamer, the script might’ve given him an extra scene or two to fully balance the triangle. On the other hand: It makes sense to keep Hae Sung at a remove. It’s how Nora experiences him, emotionally and geographically, from the moment Nora/Na Young says goodbye to Hae Sung the first time, as preteens in Seoul.
The style of “Past Lives” favors clean, direct visual setups, and a sparing but striking use of close-ups. Lee and Magaro share a crucial late scene in bed, intimate in one way, fraught and wary in another; Arthur, the husband, knows his wife’s feelings are being prodded in the direction of the Korean she used to be, which means some churn for the Korean-Canadian-American hyphenate she has become. This, the filmmaker is saying with tact and a lovely sense of empathy, is the stuff of life, especially an immigrant’s life. “This is where I ended up,” Nora tells Arthur in the bedroom scene, and it’s one of many moments in “Past Lives” that speaks someone’s truth without summarizing anyone’s feelings, reductively.
Song’s key filmmaking collaborators here include cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, who worked on Steve McQueen’s fantastic, vibrant “Small Axe”; composers Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen; and editor Keith Fraase, who worked on several of the shaggier Terrence Malick films of the 21st century. “Past Lives” is the everything-everywhere opposite of a recent-phase Malick project: tightly scripted, carefully attuned to what people actually say to each other, and what they don’t, or can’t. Nora embraces the concept of “in yun,” which translates from Korean to English as fate, or destiny, or a hint of a soul connection. For some, the lack of melodrama or fireworks may prove an emotional deterrent in “Past Lives.” For others, including me, the right movie makes you care and believe. And this is one of them.
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‘PAST LIVES’
4 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for some strong language)
Running time: 1:46
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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