Review: Past Lives

By John Corrado

★★★★ (out of 4)

Past Lives, the gorgeous directorial debut of playwright Celine Song, opens with its trio of main characters Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Arthur (John Magaro) sitting together at a bar, as an off-screen voice wonders what their connections are to each other.

From here, Song’s screenplay moves backwards to answer this question, and show what has led to this moment, with the first time filmmaker crafting a sweeping romantic drama that spans decades and leaves us with a similar sense of longing as Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.

Nora and Hae Sung are two people who met as children (played in flashbacks by Seung Ah Moon and Seung Min Yim) in Korea, but got separated when Nora’s family immigrated to Canada. They will fall in and out of touch over the years, before eventually reuniting.

This is the story, which mirrors elements of Song’s own life (she came of age in Mississauga after coming over with her family from Korea), with Nora – like Song – eventually settling in New York and working as a playwright. Threaded through the film is the Korean idea of In-Yun, a belief that two souls can be intrinsically linked to each other and are destined to come together no matter what. There are only two maybe three people in focus for much of the film, but this gives a magnitude to the story that makes it feel like it spans the universe.

This is a remarkable debut film for Song (who has never even directed a short before), showing an accomplished sense of tone, characters, and pacing. The story will jump ahead years at a time, making us feel the passage of time in a single moment, before settling into long dialogue scenes. Song knows how to frame and stage these scenes for maximum impact, with a number of heart-stopping interludes. It’s a beautifully crafted first feature, down to cinematographer Shabier Kirchner’s framing choices, and the sparse uses of music that build over the film.

The performances from the three leads are exceptional, giving profound weight to even the quietest of moments. Lee captures so much in a single look or line delivery, an internal longing that she is feeling between two people and places. Yoo delivers a similarly internalized performance, while Magaro quietly takes us through a number of heartbreaking moments.

It’s the myriad of feelings that Song captures in Past Lives – feelings of lingering, long-held desire, of being bound to someone with the timing having never been right to actually be together – that make the story so indelible and almost universally relatable. Early on in the film, the characters bond over Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Song has crafted a film that is destined to be viewed in the same way in the years to come, with it existing in a similar space of romantic yearning as the Before trilogy (though its influences go all the way back to David Lean’s 1945 classic Brief Encounter).

In the Q&A after the advance screening that I saw at TIFF Bell Lightbox last week, Song mentioned the Leonard Cohen song “True Love Leaves No Traces” as a source of inspiration while writing the film. I listened to this song again on the way home, as well as several times while writing this review. “True love leaves no traces, if you and I are one, it’s lost in our embraces, like stars against the sun,” Cohen sings on the track over Phil Spector’s soaring Wall of Sound production. And, yeah, Song captures that exact same poignant feeling spread over the entire film.

It’s a film about lost connections and missed opportunities that builds slowly and then hits you like a ton of bricks, both shattering your heart and helping to piece it back together again. It’s not only bound to be one of the best movies of the year, but also feels like an instant classic.