Burdened with high expectations following rave reviews in the US and the fact that it’s the only film from this year’s Sundance Festival that people are still really talking about as the Summer blockbuster season ends and awards season begins in earnest, Past Lives has a lot to live up to. Luckily, playwright Celine Song’s cinematic debut absolutely merits the hype it’s received. A cross-continental, quarter-century spanning romance, it’s got an epic sweep, grounded by countless moments of touching, sharply-observed intimacy that examine how love changes as we age, both temporary and permanent, practical and romantic, and rarely as simple as we’d like it to be.
At the heart of Past Lives is the star-crossed romance between Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). We first meet them as two tween best friends on the verge of becoming something more at their Seoul school before Nora’s family moves to Canada, cutting contact between the pair for 12 years. For a while, they reconnect over Skype after Hae Sung reaches out online following the completion of his military service, but they lose touch again for another 12 years, by which time Nora is living in New York and has married fellow writer Arthur (John Magaro in the John Magaro-est role imaginable).
Song keeps the timeline clean – no jumping back and forth here – and it’s very moving watching Nora and Hae Sung grow (first together and then apart) into practical adults who harbour a capacity for deep and complex feeling that both have decided to ever so slightly repress. The stuff with the pair as kids is really great, with Song finding loads of subtle ways to communicate a first love, from the words and actions of her characters to simple camera moves that say a lot with a little, and if the middle section, conducted almost entirely over Skype chats, is a little less impactful, the final era packs a real punch.
Under the pretences of ‘vacation’, Hae Sung comes to New York to reconnect with Nora after a decade of no contact and two decades of not having met in person. It’s an awkward but cathartic trip – not just for Nora and Hae Sung, but Arthur too – as the lead trio figure out just what love means to each of them, all while trying to control their less rational emotions, be they regret, jealousy, or just a painful sense of time going by. Song offers no easy answers or judgements, letting her characters’ feelings become our own with a gentle restraint.
The cast turn in very solid performances throughout the film, though there’s no doubt what everyone’s standout scene is. As the story approaches its climax, the lead trio find themselves at a bar late into the night, discussing love and their own natures in a mix of English and Korean. It’s a scene, full of Big Lines and Big Ideas, that could easily tip into something too affected after the minimalism of what’s come before, but Song’s incredibly empathetic writing and some career-best acting from all involved allows the moment to slowly build into a pragmatic profundity that a lot of writers would kill to reach.
It’s a moment of characters offering pure kindness and understanding to not just one another, but themselves, and if that sounds a little mawkish on paper, rest assured that it’s exquisitely well-handled in practice. It feels like a natural culmination for a film like this, one with the wit to be able to take the practical mundanities of life and love and imbue them with just enough romantic longing to make them unforgettable.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 