In writer-director Celine Song’s tender triptych Past Lives, set during three segments 12 years apart, time is a wily and unpredictable mistress. Sometimes it goes by in a blip: a simple cut and some onscreen text informing us, in the eternal present tense, “12 years pass.”
Then, when the two protagonists, childhood friends finally uniting in adulthood, see one another for the first time in some 144 months, it feels as if they’ve just spoken, because in movie-time they have. Conversely, Song lets time protract as well as collapse, feeling the tension, the ache, the silence between two characters who seem to know each other in their bones, whose communication transcends the verbal. Thirty seconds of stillness can seem eternal, in a film as in life. And 12 years can eclipse in a flash, in a film as in life.
Past Lives is about the slippery nature of temporal mechanics, but it’s also about the mysterious intensity of platonic connections — the implacable bond between people that, should you believe in soul connections, dates back across the centuries. The people are Nora Moon (Seung Ah Moon) and Hae Sung (Seung Mi Yim), whom we meet as childhood friends in South Korea. Both excel in school, though only Nora, already trying out her Americanized name, seems to have ambitions beyond her station. Raised in a family of artists, she seems sanguine about their plans to immigrate to Canada, where her writer mother and filmmaker father are planning to continue their creative endeavors. Why move, asks Hae Sung’s mother, when they’ve achieved such success in their native country? “If you leave something behind, you gain something too,” Nora’s mom replies, as succinctly as a koan.
The children’s goodbye is brief and, at least for Nora, unsentimental. She walks a lengthy flight of steps from her school up to her family’s house for the last time; Hae Sung stays where he is. This will become a recurring motif in the intervening decades. Nora, spurred by talent and ambition, keeps ascending, while Hae Sung remains static.
Song cuts to 12 years later, in which the fully westernized Nora (Greta Lee) — Macbook at her desk, Tervis tumbler at her side — is now living in New York and writing for the theater. She discovers through Facebook that Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), still living in South Korea, has spent much of a decade-plus trying to reconnect with her. And so they “meet” on Skype, first for an hours-long conversation, then seemingly daily, living each other’s lives vicariously: When Hae Sung rides a ski lift to its apex, he brings Nora with him on his glitchy smartphone, showing her the vast cityscapes of Seoul.
She recommends movies to him, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a metatextual wink from Song that is, of course, about a connection between two people that’s so ingrained that even technological wizardry cannot extinguish it. (Past Lives also harkens to Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy and the best works of Eric Rohmer, two directors also known for their expansion and contraction of time.)
But this, too, does not last, with Nora requesting an end to their illusory reconnection so that she can focus completely on her work. The final, and longest, portion of Past Lives is set another 12 years later, where Hae Sung finally travels to New York to see Nora, who is now married to an American writer, Arthur (John Magaro).
From its first moments, Past Lives approaches the sublime, and its emotional marriage of elegant but naturalistic dialogue and precise visuals only increases as we grow to love all three characters. A false note is never struck, and when characters gain insight, they do so organically.
Hae-Sung, who suffers a debilitating sense of his own “ordinariness,” may be stuck in the same place after 24 years — still hanging out with the same friends, in the same South Korean bar — but he has accrued enough wisdom to see the bigger picture. When Nora cuts off their Skype sessions, he acknowledges, through his pain, that it’s a wise decision, a complexity of thought that’s mirrored later when Arthur, despite his envy at the preternatural closeness between Nora and Hae-Sung, admits that Hae-Sung’s coming to visit was the right thing to do. They both grow, as men and as human beings, right in front of our eyes.
Past Lives shows us that our existence is full of teachable moments, which are all the more impactful because Song never succumbs to over-explaining them. We’re never instructed what to think. We embrace each moment, even if we don’t know exactly what it “means.”
There is much talk in the movie of the Korean concept of in-yeon, about the providential past-life connections of people who meet even briefly. But there’s another Eastern idea that strikes at the core of this beautiful, profound and nonjudgmental look at three people making their way in life: Be here now.
PAST LIVES. Director: Celine Song; Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro; Distributor: A24; Rated PG-13; in English and Korean; Now playing at Movies of Delray, CMX Downtown at the Gardens, Cinemark Palace Boca Raton, AMC Pompano Beach 18, and other area theaters.