“Past Lives,” a story of childhood friends from Seoul who reunite as adults in New York, is less a love story than a meditation on transplantation and transience.
Back and forth we go, through time, in Celine Song’s début film, “Past Lives,” and there’s not a DeLorean in sight. After a brief opening scene, in a New York bar, the words “24 years earlier” appear onscreen. For a second, I misread “years” as “hours”—a more manageable flashback—but no, Song really is grabbing us by the hand and asking us to leap before we look.
The exciting news for Na Young is that she and her family are relocating, to Canada. As if that were not transformative enough, she acquires an English name, Nora Moon, which sounds like the heroine of a fairy tale. Hae Sung is upset by her departure, but, hey, he’s a kid; he’ll get over it. He does not. Twelve years later, as an adult , Hae Sung reaches out to Nora , now an aspiring playwright in New York. True to the mechanisms of modern love, they connect on Facebook.
Another dozen years flit by. Nora, living in the East Village, is married to Arthur , a writer whom she met at a creative retreat in Montauk. The existence of Hae Sung, on the other hand, has stalled. Now an engineer, he still goes out drinking in Seoul with his buddies, and he’s meant to be getting married, but, as he says, “I’m too ordinary.” The one extraordinary thing about him is the strength of his feelings for Nora, which refuse to subside.
Yet the film hits home. In part, that is a tribute to its melancholy. Unlike the nocturnal strollers in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” , who leaned into love while seated on a bench, beside a gorgeously envisioned Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, Hae Sung and Nora stand stiffly in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, in daylight, whilecouple, behind them, are enfolded in a kiss. In short, Song’s film may not be a love story at all.
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