Celine Song’s Past Lives is a love story for grown-ups, with mature, tender chemistry

Past Lives. // Courtesy A24

There are a lot of dividing lines in Celine Song’s Past Lives.

Vertical lines split the frame between childhood best friends on the cusp of being separated by an ocean, a married couple in gently conflicted emotional states getting ready for bed, and reunited characters connecting after decades apart, considering each other on the NYC subway. Those lines say a lot about where the characters on each side of them are emotionally: physically together, but personally isolated. 

Past Lives is a movie about internal changes, and the ways we communicate them (or don’t) with the ones we’re closest to. It’s about how each of us is a world unto ourselves that we invite others to join — sometimes for a short while, sometimes for a long time, sometimes for intermittent periods. Sometimes we’re apart, even when we’re in the same space, and that’s ok.

Song’s film, about childhood sweethearts who reconnect as adults, is quietly magical in the way that the movies of Wong Kar Wai, or Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, are magical. It’s both achingly yearning and grounded in realistic emotions and conversations, with settings you can practically smell. This is the kind of movie that sets up a pup tent in your brain and never really leaves, drawing you gently back every so often.

As children, classmates Na Young and Hae Sung are as close as can be, competing for top grades in the classroom, walking each other home and playfully flirting. The pair lose touch after Na Young’s family moves from South Korea to Canada, where she initially struggles to fit in. 12 years later, Na Young, now Nora (Greta Lee), is a playwright in Toronto. She briefly reconnects with Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), now an engineering student in Seoul, online. Their old spark immediately rekindles, with glitchy Skype conversations that last for hours. Nora abruptly breaks it off when she realizes their long-distance almost-relationship doesn’t have a future.

We check in on Nora again another 12 years on. Now she’s in New York, married to novelist Arthur (John Magaro), and working on rehearsals for a play she’s written. Hae Sung again pops up in her life, on a visit to New York that Nora quickly realizes is a plan to see her one more time before Hae Sung decides whether to marry his current girlfriend.

Nora is conflicted. She’s happy with Arthur and has no plans to leave her marriage. Hae Sung, however, represents a deeper part of her identity that she hasn’t revisited since she left Korea, and the emotions he stirs in her are profound. 

Lee, Yoo, and Magaro make a great trio. Lee’s Nora is impressively self-possessed and mature, but also capable of childlike delight. Yoo plays Hae Sung perfectly as both a younger and older adult, a little unmoored, uncertain, unsatisfied, but gradually realizing who he’s become and what he needs as a more mature grown-up. Magaro’s Arthur is both incredibly sweet and a little nervous. It would be easy to make him into an insecure villain in a story like this (he even says as much). Instead, Song makes Arthur both respectful and understandably anxious, looking on as Nora and Hae Sung converse in Korean, both feeling left out and understanding the connection the two of them share.

Song couches all of this in a late spring/early summer vision of New York defined by soft, natural light and a lived-in feel. Even if you’ve never spent time in this city, you know how this time of year feels in any city. It’s warm but not blisteringly hot, the air fresh and thick with possibility, with comfortably languid nights that stretch on forever.

Past Lives is a gently devastating tale that hits on universally familiar themes—paths not taken, gratitude for what has been and what is, considering what the future holds—through one specific story that feels deeply personal. More than that, Past Lives feels wonderfully grown-up, letting its characters be real, with internal worlds we know the outlines of, even if we never get the specific details. This is a story placed right in the tender spot of true adulthood, with characters coming to terms with who they’ve been, who they are now, and how their needs have changed. It’s a little bittersweet but wonderfully generous in spirit.