Celine Song’s directorial debut reaches for wistful romances but ends up just feeling calculated.
is a lopsided love story trying to pass itself off as a mutual one. The urge is understandable. Presented as a shared experience, the film’s events take the shape of a meditation on paths not taken, stretching over a quarter-century and half the globe. It picks up with childhood sweethearts Nora and Hae Sung , who part ways when Nora’s family emigrates to Canada from Seoul. Twelve years later, when Nora’s getting an M.F.A. in the U.S.
It isn’t that intriguing in the movie, which uses its subdued tone to elide how little texture or tension it has. Part of the reasonglides along so frictionlessly is that while it splits its time between Nora in New York and Hae Sung in Korea, it’s only Nora who feels like a whole being. Nora has her ambitions, trying to scale the New York theater scene from within, while Hae Sung, who’s studying engineering, comes across as someone whose life is without a gravitational center in Nora’s absence.
Though Nora mentions looking at flights to Seoul when she and Hae Sung start talking in their 20s, the film never creates any real sense that she’s torn or yearning to return, even for the guy she’s been engaging in a flurry of Skype conversations with. “Koreans don’t win the Nobel Prize for literature,” she sassily informs Hae Sung when they’re kids, and the prizes and recognition she mentions over the years become specifically American.
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