Past Lives
Star-crossed childhood friends reunite as adults in this moving, deeply melancholic film from Celine Song
Celine Song’s Past Lives opens with two men and a woman sitting in a stylish New York bar. Looking at them from across the room, we can’t make out what they’re saying to each other, but we can hear another table nearby conjecturing as to exactly how these three people are connected. The rest of the film is an attempt to answer that question.
Not literally, of course, as we quickly learn the facts of the situation. Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) were childhood sweethearts in Seoul until her family immigrated to Canada. From there she became an adult, and a writer, and a wife to a man named Arthur (John Magaro). The pair are living together in New York when Hae Sung shows up unexpectedly, giving Nora the chance to see her first love in the flesh for the first time in 20 years.
There’s no melodrama – there are no furious accusations or sobbing confessions, no one yells up at anybody’s window and the characters never even really argue, let alone fight. Instead, we watch three incredibly lived-in performances guide these characters through a thoughtful, soft-spoken script.
It’s a film about star-crossed lovers and all the things that can happen, down here on Earth, to keep them from crossing. There’s a deep and aching melancholy to Past Lives, but also something hopeful – the suggestion that maybe the imperfect lives and imperfect loves we make for ourselves are all the more meaningful because they weren’t written in the stars.
Released 8 Sep by StudioCanal; certificate 12A