Three people sit at a bar.  Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), Nora (Greta Lee), and Arthur (John Magaro).  Across from them, off-screen, friends talk amongst themselves as they watch these strangers and try to figure out who they are to each other, who they were, and how they ended up here together. 

Celine Song’s debut feature film, Past Lives, was picked up for distribution by A24 after a buzzy Sundance premiere.  This multi-national, decade-spanning romance seeks to unlock one of the most unanswerable questions in just 105 minutes: What if?  Song displays an incredible handle over the tone of the film, slowly building with each scene, each passing year, so that it is not an overwrought melodrama but a carefully constructed and masterfully orchestrated emotional explosion.  It is cathartic in the best sense of the word, transported from the Greek theatrons and onto the modern cinema screens. 

The film is mostly told through the eyes of Lee’s Nora, but it does break away at pivotal moments to check in on Hae Sung.  What makes Past Lives such a unique romance is that for much of the film, Nora and Hae Sung are half the world apart yet the chemistry they foster is undeniable.  The film opens some twenty-four years earlier in South Korea with a young Nora, then Na Young (Moon Seung-min), and Hae Sung (Leem Seung-min) on their first date as arranged by Nora’s mother (Ji Hye Yoon) before she and the family immigrate to Canada.  Twelve years pass, Yoo and Lee take over, and Na Young has now moved to New York City, changed her name to Nora, to is pursuing a career in writing while Hae Sung has remained back home in South Korea, served his time in the military, and moved back home while he tries to figure out his next steps in life.  Reaching out over Facebook, Hae Sung and Nora reunite and for the next twenty or so minutes, Song delivers what is essentially a long-form montage but what is most impressive is how much chemistry Lee and Yoo manage while never sharing the screen together physically.  Tech on screen is always a hard thing to pull off, but Song embraces the frustrations of dropped and laggy calls that we have all been a part of. Life is not always like the movies, but this film is very much like life. It sets the stage for a fairy tale reunion, but that opening scene at the bar lingers in the corners of audiences’ minds, and the unavoidable question that sits on the right side of the frame:  Who is this third person? 

During a residency, Nora meets Arthur, the man at the bar, and when Song again jumps her film twelve years in advance, Nora and Arthur have been married for about seven years.  Song, in her own subtle way, breaks the fourth wall because she knows audiences are seeing where this story is tracking, and she uses Arthur’s fears to validate our own concerns.  He says it himself, he is the villain of this story, the white Jewish boy that got in the way of the two childhood sweethearts. This vulnerability shown by Arthur is very much needed because not only does it set up some additional stakes for the third act when Hae Sung comes to visit New York, but it also helps frame the emotional arc for Nora. 

There is a bit of a mystery in that third act, a will they/won’t they question as there is still a clear connection between the two now-grown children, and while Hae Sung certainly visited to see his childhood sweetheart and the ball is now in Nora’s court if she will fall back in love with him.  Song has laid out quite the trap, as we have not been allowed to see much of Nora and Arthur’s relationship and from what we have seen he seems rather uninterested, though a kinder reading is that they are comfortable in the lives they have built around each other. The chemistry is not quite lacking, but it takes a very different form from the electricity which Nora and Hae Sung had shown us in the second act. It is not until he reveals his fears to his wife, validating our own concerns, and showing that they are very much in love albeit in a different way than she and Hae Sung are that the complexity of the film begins to truly reveal itself because these characters know just as much as we do, but notably they never act like they are characters in a narrative. 

The final act of Past Lives finds us back at the bar, but now we are privy to the conversation that before we were out of earshot from, and it is nothing short of thrilling. Song has, through her commitment to the simplicity of the film, brought these deep emotions to life on screen in one of the most captivating and engaging final acts of the year, more magnetic and immersive than even the best-constructed set pieces of films whose any single line item of their budget will far exceed this film’s total cost. Knowing Arthur’s fears, it becomes painfully apparent at the torturous state he has put himself in as Nora and Hae Sung eventually transition to speaking only in Korean. It becomes too much to keep stopping and translating what Arthur does not understand; though notably, not for lack of trying. As the conversation continues, Nora finds herself facing Hae Sung as they reminisce about their childhood and Arthur sips his cocktail in silence, edged out of the frame with his wife’s back facing him. It is not a showy sequence, but its power reverberates greatly. The restraint shown in this long sequence’s construction by Shabier Kirchner to not move the camera wildly around but rather let us observe, and equal restraint by Keith Fraase in the editing suite to allow the sequences to play out for long takes without the reprieve of a cutaway all help us feel the weight which all three of these characters find themselves currently burdened. It is crushing. 

Song has one more powerhouse scene left to end the film on. The trio return to the apartment and Nora walks Hae Sung back outside to catch his Uber. Notably, they travel the frame from right to left, as if going back to the past. “Your Uber is 2 minutes away.” The time feels at once too fast, but also an eternity, and there is a lingering fear of what will Nora do. Somehow, Song has engineered a plot that, were it to end on that fairy tale / reunited after years type of story that it was setting the stage for at the onset, it would absolutely ruin the magic of it all. Instead, Hae Sung, after delivering a gut-wrenching remark that maybe they are living out one of the “in-yeon” which will lead their future selves together, but that it just not is meant to be in this lifetime makes one – possibly final – call back to Nora before stepping into the car. Fraase then smash cuts 24 years in the past as the young Hae Sung walks a distraught Na Young back home. The moment is reminiscent of an equally powerful cut late in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), both pulling inspiration from the Orpheus and Eurydice story which warns of the dangers of living in the past and looking back and they both land with chilling accuracy. 

While it does not have the same visual identity of a Wong Kar Wai film – in fact it is rather plainly, yet competently shot – Past Lives is very much dealing in the same emotional register as the Chinese auteur who has built a prolific filmography surrounding the melancholia that often accompanies love. Song’s work, though, is not one of imitation, but rather a wholly realized pain, on record of being at least somewhat inspired by her own life, but dealing with feelings and emotions that can transcend across ages, languages, and nationalities, bridging the gap between the silver screen and the auditorium seats and shaking audiences to their core. Past Lives is a shining example of less-is-more filmmaking that expertly disassembles the modern romance into something real, yet something that is unlike anything we have seen on screen before.