Film Review

Past Lives (2023) — complex immigrant romance full of yearning

Two childhood friends are wrested apart after one’s family emigrates from South Korea. 20 years later, they’re reunited for one fateful week…

The first few seconds of Celine Song’s decades-spanning, poignantly lived-in debut feature, Past Lives, are about assumptions. As cinematographer Shabier Kirschner’s camera slowly pushes in on our three protagonists — Nora (Greta Lee), Hae-sung (Teo Yoo), and Arthur (John Magaro) — sitting at a bar together, an off-screen couple remarks on what could possibly be the relation between them. One of them conjectures that Nora and Hae-sung are a couple, while Arthur is their tour guide. The other thinks that Nora and Arthur are the couple in question, while Hae-sung is their Korean friend. All the while, Kirschner’s camera continues to unwaveringly move forward, until Nora is the only person in the centre of the frame, her face laced with both a sense of mild excitement and deep uncertainty. The answer to the couple’s inquiry, as it turns out, is far more complex than either of them could have anticipated.

As the film jumps back 24 years, we’re thrown into Seoul, South Korea, where we promptly learn that Nora (then called Na-young) and Hae-sung were childhood friends with an unusually close bond, to the degree where both their parents would eventually set up a date for both of them to further strengthen it. With a relative economy of narrative, Song patiently traces the innocence of a burgeoning young relationship set against the backdrop of the apartment-laden cityscapes of Seoul, one steadily formed in the backseats of sedans, stone installations in parks, and the open dirt fields behind an elementary school building. Such stylistic modesty, tangible attention to detail, and atmospheric patience remain consistent throughout the film’s layered yet ostensibly simple narrative. It’s here we get the first taste of how this film chooses to elegantly move through months’ worth of development, change, and time.