Review: “Past Lives” is a staggering work of beauty that trusts its audience to get it

The film-fest favorite “Past Lives” has all the momentum in the world going into its wide release this month, and every ounce of it is earned.

The compact drama, distributed by the A24 imprint, is directed and written by Korean-American playwright Celine Song, who’s known in the theater world for such inspired projects as staging Chekov’s “The Seagull” in the Sims 4 video game.

“Past Lives” is her directorial debut and heralds a staggering new creative voice in film, as sophisticated and deliberate as it is insightful. The movie centers on Nora, an elementary school girl growing up in Seoul, South Korea, alongside chum Hae Sung. The kids, played respectively and wonderfully by Moon Seung-ah and Leem Seung-min, tease one another and bond as their lives intertwine organically, forging a connection that neither can shake.

Nora, a stand-in for director Song, comes from a creative family — a film director father and visual artist mother — who are willing to give up their careers for a new life in Canada. The movie starts 24 years ago as the young friends are ripped apart, dealing with their break more in sullen, lost looks and body language than dialogue.

Twelve years later, Nora Moon (as she calls herself now, and played as an adult by Greta Lee) is a burgeoning playwright living in New York City. She’s sharply focused on her writing career, having previously told Hae Sung (now played by Teo Yoo) that she wants to win the Nobel Prize. That seems impossible to her while living in Korea, and in the U.S. she’s willingly assimilated to American academic culture. (Now she wants the Pulitzer, she half-jokes.)

Nora’s living the fabled life of the mind. Meanwhile, Hae Sung is still living in South Korea, having snapped onto a humble engineering track and fitting neatly into the expectations placed on him. He decides one day to reach out to Nora on Facebook by posting on the page for one of her father’s movies. Nora’s intrigued and reaches back to him, eventually creating a video-call relationship where the two spend as much time smiling at each other as speaking.

It is not to be. Neither is willing to give up their current lives, despite their obvious and intense connection, and Nora rationalizes it by convincing herself that it’s just too painful to continue. She breaks things off, to their sorrow, and invests herself in a creative fellowship that introduces her to the young American writer Arthur (John Magaro).

Just like that, another 12 years pass before they connect again.

There aren’t spoilers, per se, but there’s no benefit to describing the rest of the movie. Like the first two acts, the ending unfolds with delicacy and care for its characters, nurturing their emotional lives while posing thorny questions about fate versus happenstance. The uncertainty is palpable, and Song plays with our assumptions and projections by staging scenes that feel unpredictable in their energy. She avoids tropes and instead looks deeper into the hearts of her mature characters.

Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner frequently positions the pair on either side of the screen, trading close-ups for parallel boxes that trace the invisible forces binding them. As befits the themes, images are layered and reflected in windows and lorded over by soft, gray skies — wistful postcards of everyday life. There’s intrigue and complexity in these settings, entire worlds of possibility that are built atop one another.

One can imagine the script for “Past Lives” is more description than dialogue. Lee, as Nora, reanimates quotidian concepts like soulmates and reincarnation into blood-pumping realities. She makes the absolute most of every shot she’s in, her face a complex map of ambition and longing. Lee seemingly has every pore under her control and carries much of the movie through micro-expressions. So many awards are headed her way.

Yoo, as Hae Sung, is quiet and shy until his blindingly sunny smile emerges. He’s an undeniable heartthrob on screen, and the actor’s range shows a similar command of subtlety. One can’t help but leave the theater with images of the two gazing sheepishly, then intensely, at one another through choppy video calls and touristy interludes, saying everything and nothing at once. They’re standing on either side of the same puddle in which a downed power line has paralyzed them. Song trusts the audience enough to see that.

“Past Lives” feels so deliciously restrained that it makes even quiet dramas seem histrionic. And yet it’s a wide emotional field that gives its characters room to breathe. For all its bittersweetness, it’s also a deeply satisfying experience that deals with intimate subjects in global terms. Or maybe the other way around? Either way, if “Past Lives” isn’t 2023’s best film, we’re in for an incredible year of cinema.

“Past Lives”

Rated: PG-13
Run time: 106 minutes
Where: in theaters
Score: 4 stars (out of 4)

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