A somewhat classic premise: a love triangle, where an ex-boyfriend from childhood suddenly re-emerges and perturbs an ongoing relationship, testing, on all sides, the boundaries of love. 24 years after Nora (Greta Lee) emigrated from South Korea, Hae-sung (Teo Yoo), her first love, comes to New York, where she lives with her husband, Arthur (John Donkey), to meet with her. What Celine Song seeks to explore in Past Lives is not so much the predictable outcome in such a story, for the love to rekindle because it persists over time, but the dilemma itself – what exactly is true love and are the laws of destiny actually right?

Despite an impressive festival circuit (international premiere at Sundance, European premiere at Berlinale), Past Lives is not quite an art film, nor is it a mainstream one; it sits somewhere in between, as a prototype of the post-2010 modern melodrama (along with Skype-mediated relationships), which caters for everyone through a certain universality of latent feelings and lost and possibly found loves. Song’s film is basically a decent and conventional debut, which doesn’t take any risks and sticks to a classic and sometimes ultra-aestheticized language, but which is guaranteed to elicit at least a bittersweet smile to all the clumsy and selfish gestures made by its characters, as we all often fall victim to out of and for love. If we are willing to set aside the cynicism, Past Lives easily makes its way into the viewer’s heart, as it is a serene, candid, and unpretentious love story.

With the two reconnecting for the first time twelve years after she and her family left South Korea, him looking for her on the Internet and then losing contact due to bad timing, what Past Lives follows is the confrontation of all those feelings that arise with the thought of “what if”. What if the two had admitted to their feelings back then? What if Nora hadn’t met Arthur?  Where, in fact, was the hand of fate, where is it, or rather who does the principle of “inyeon” refer to, which Nora invokes, suggesting that there is a Korean belief that certain people will find each other inevitably and regardless of circumstances throughout all their lives?

Song balances two different kinds of love – the enticing mirage of a potential relationship with Hae-sung, an idealistic love that endures over time and which fate seems to rekindle every now and then, and the certainty of the relationship with Arthur, a love unburdened by anything prophetic, but which actually happened and is still proved by real actions and a generous understanding – Nora’s husband is learning Korean for her because he knows that otherwise there would be parts of her that he wouldn’t be able to understand. Moreover, delicately nuanced by Magaro’s soft and gentle performance, Arthur seems to accept, with bitterness but again out of love, the doubts stirred in Nora by her reunion with her first love, allowing her to explore them as much as she needs and being ready to be there for her should she decide to return. On the other hand, Hae-sung brings memories of the past; for Nora, he also represents a life in Korea, a culture to which she is inherently linked and towards which she is drawn, no matter how integrated she seems in her new world as a writer/playwright in New York.

Celine Song’s debut is a welcome warm breeze, even if just a breeze, but on rainy autumn evenings, that doesn’t hurt either.

By not seeing much of the characters’ lives outside of these encounters, if taken as a film about immigration and the Asian communities in the US, Past Lives runs the risk of being no more than a superficial brush on the subject, even if, counterintuitively, a good deal of the characters’ essential traits are based on their ethnicities. Nora, for example, remarks about Hae-sung being affected by a typical South Korean masculinity that makes him proud and overly reserved. Song’s film is more relevant if interpreted as a small romantic and sentimental scheme of individual destinies, but one that could speak about anyone, despite the fact that the story is autobiographical for the director.

Still, Past Lives suffers at times in the “thrill and feels” department. Apart from an emotional and gracefully executed ending, where gestures communicate far more than words, the film rarely reaches visceral moments of emotional intensity that could provide real concreteness to the characters and reduce the degree of modern fable it occasionally flirts with. We can smile, maybe even cry empathetically, but we never feel torn apart, as one expects to. Song opts for generally non-confrontational attitudes and resolutions, which are essentially sweet but not necessarily satisfying. As much as the possible and recognizable tragedy of their relationship comes from the fact that they are, so to speak, two idiots incapable of communicating their true feelings to each other, Nora and Hae-sung seem far too formal in their interactions. Past Lives lacks a bit of the subtlety that a film like Kogonada’s Columbus has – another (more visionary) debut on similar topics, which articulates more discreetly and with more chemistry some observations about love, i.e. love could be different than romantic or it could be romantic without manifesting as such.

Don’t get me wrong, all this is not to say that Past Lives isn’t romantic or worth watching – Song’s film is by no means deplorable, in fact, it can honestly be said that “its heart is in the right place”. Past Lives doesn’t ask much from the viewer, maybe only that they show an open heart as well, and if all average films of contemporary cinema looked like that, maybe everything would be fine. Celine Song’s debut is a welcome warm breeze, even if just a breeze, but on rainy autumn evenings, that doesn’t hurt either.

Dora Leu

Graduated with a BA in film directing and a MA in film studies from UNATC; she's also studied history of art. Also collaborates with the Acoperisul de Sticla film magazine and is a former coordinator of FILM MENU. She's dedicated herself to '60-'70s Japanese cinema and Irish post-punk music bands. Still keeps a picture of Leslie Cheung in her wallet.