‘Past Lives’ shows time beautifully spent
Tribune News Service
Late in “Past Lives,” there’s a scene in which two people walk down a street and silently wait for an Uber, captured in a single shot. Like the film itself, it is a deceptively simple moment, a seemingly mundane interaction that is simmering with tension and fraught with meaning, the ticking clock of the car’s imminent arrival pulling the narrative taut. It’s a deft and daring choice from filmmaker Celine Song, especially since she just lets the audience take this in, secure in the knowledge that our attentive patience has been carefully earned over the course of “Past Lives,” a film that is at once about two minutes, a day, a year, 12 years, a lifetime and many lifetimes.
The essence of cinema, one could argue, is the manipulation of time, which is extended, compressed, sliced and reorganized with ease on screen, and time is what Song sets out to tease apart in her debut feature “Past Lives”: the vastness and brevity of lifetimes, the piercing nature of memory, the push and pull between fate and our own effort on existence. She presents these monumental questions with an autobiographical story about a childhood sweetheart visiting his lost love many years after they were separated.
Hae-Sung (Teo Yoo) has big, sad eyes. Nora (Greta Lee) has a quick, mischievous smile. They see each other for the first time in 12 years across a glitchy Skype connection circa 2012, smiling shyly and not saying much. The last time they had seen each other was in
Seoul, right before Nora, formerly known as Na Young (Seung-Ah Moon) emigrated with her family to Canada. Now she lives in New York City, trying to make it as a playwright. They reconnect in adulthood after Nora stumbles upon a random Facebook post, and the two old pals tumble easily into an obsessive long-distance friendship that threatens to tip into romance if only they had some time together.
With the beautifully wrought “Past Lives,” Song argues for making emotional space for these fated connections, acknowledging those who have been meaningful to us, and who may still be, whether it was lifetimes, a few years or even a moment ago.