She can’t be waiting around, dividing her brain between time zones, when she’s got plays to write and dreams to achieve.Īnother dozen years go by, bringing us to the era of Past Lives ’ winning barroom prologue.

But, just as Nora’s move loomed over her childhood, her ambition looms over this relationship. But Song’s shallow focus, allowing the words on their computer screens to blur, and tight framing draws them together in a tight hug, though they’re speaking across the world. Yoo’s bottled-up engineer is as creaky as a smitten Tin Man. Lee’s nervous playwright keeps messing with her hair, and her Korean has gotten a little rusty. Their awkward yet warm conversation, after Nora finds Hae Sung on Facebook, is one of easy familiarity. But Past Lives excels because they aren’t positioned as eternally bound lovers who will always reunite, or as tragic heroes, their longing frozen on video chat like a digital Tantalus. On Nora’s last day, Hae Sung can barely bring himself to look at her, let alone speak to her, on their forked walk back from school.Ī dozen years later, the urban isolation and yearning of Wong Kar-wai permeates the screen as Nora crawls into her cramped apartment and Hae Sung pounds soju in a packed bar. Grades are a sticking point, as is crying. The initial, underplayed childhood crush is chaperoned and shot with an emphasis on the physical, adult obstructions that keep kids apart (seatbelts, branching paths home, sculptures in the park that become impromptu jungle gyms) and the little things that bind kids together. Song’s strongest thematic thrust as she navigates the film’s three acts-spanning Nora’s childhood, loneliness, reconnection, loss and re-reconnection-is that this isn’t exceptional. We all get through the day, magnetically suspended between our regrets and our realities.

As Past Lives takes us through its time jumps, we understand that the divergent desires pulling on Nora and Hae Sung are simply heightened versions of the forces acting on all of us. Whenever we meet her-whether as a kid, about to leave Hae Sung and Korea behind, or as a twentysomething connecting with him on Skype, or as a married woman hosting his visit to New York-she’s made her choices, or has had them made for her. Nora isn’t really caught between East and West, just as she is never really caught between her childhood crush Hae Sung and her husband Arthur (John Magaro). Drawing from a long tradition of yearning romances, while showcasing debut writer/director Celine Song’s unique abilities with precise writing and delicate scene-crafting, Past Lives flows from decade to decade with ease, encompassing immigration, coming-of-age, and creative and romantic ennui-only to reach a heartrending acceptance of our exquisite inability to have it all. It reminds us that tethering your life to someone else’s to brave the current together is an act of defiant perseverance.

It reminds us that it is possible to encounter magic, conjured by the flow of everyday actions, when we pass people multiple times along our lives’ intertwining rivers. Not because the decades-spanning relationship between Greta Lee’s Nora and Teo Yoo’s Hae Sung is inconsequential, but because it is consequential in spite of its briefness and its emotional opacity. Named partially for inyun-a Korean concept encompassing fate, intention and consequence, like a reincarnation-bridging butterfly effect- Past Lives ’ bittersweet romance brings to mind Longfellow’s ships passing in the night.

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