Past Lives

 

Director Celine Song's quietly iridescent feature film debut Past Lives is the kind of movie cinephiles love -- unpretentious, stunningly beautiful stories that are driven by characters we care for deeply.

In Past Lives, Song, with masterful visual eloquence, tells the story of a young Korean immigrant woman, Nora (an enchanting Greta Lee in her first lead role), who reconnects with her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (an endearing Teo Yoo) after nearly 20 years of separation.

Since the two were schoolmates in Seoul, Nora has moved to New York to become a playwright. She has married

Arthur, a white Jewish American writer (the ever-wonderful John Magaro) she met during a residency in Montauk, and she has become a Korean-American, a distinction that grows more salient as this involving story unfolds.

Arthur has come to love Nora deeply but accepts that he might not be whom she was meant to be with, in keeping with the Buddhist belief in fated destiny. Magaro (a personal favorite of mine since his delightful turn as Charlie in The Big Short) plays Arthur's fear and uncertainty with brilliant understatement. We feel and fear for him.

For his part, Hae Sung has pined for Nora, whom he knew as Na Young when she was a girl. After an initial attempt to reconnect with her 12 years after her departure, Nora insisted that they not continue their regular Facetime conversations. The wounding for Hae Sung was deep, and he was unable to let go of the possibilities that slipped away.

When Hae Sung finally makes the trip to New York City -- reputedly for vacation but actually to see Nora / Na -- 12 years after their last conversation, the meeting is fraught with the awkwardness on can imagine. This scene of the old friends' initial meeting is lovely, wistful and, yes, quite sad.

The film is deliberately paced and structured around the interactions among its three principal characters who epitomize what is (mostly) good in (most) human beings -- tenderheartedness and ambivalence, uncertainty about our decisions but resolve to see through our commitments, be they fated or not.

Song's film, one of the best I've seen this year, matches the hope and heartache at its center with breathtaking photography of both cityscapes and those dimly lit, intimate spaces where people have difficult exchanges about which the outcomes are uncertain.