‘Past Lives’ looks at childhood love, and what we leave behind

“Past Lives,” the graceful debut feature from the Korean Canadian playwright Celine Song, stands a world apart from most of today’s slick movie fare. Centering on two childhood friends who briefly reunite as adults, it’s the kind of contemplative movie that can easily get drowned out in the din. An audience favorite at the recent Sundance film festival, it has, I think, a shot at resonating with a wider crowd. It’s about the choices one makes in life, and it has a delicacy of feeling that stays with you long after the film is over.

We first meet Nora (Moon Seung-ah) and Hae Sung (Seung Min-yim), both 12, as they return home from school. Nora has learned, to her sorrow, that Hae Sung has scored higher on an exam, a rare occurrence. He tries to console her. But it is Hae Sung who will soon need consolation: Nora’s parents – her father is a film director, her mother an artist – are moving the family from Seoul to Toronto.

Although Nora is warily excited by the prospect, it’s clear these children love each other without yet knowing what that really means or how to articulate the loss. Their parting, rendered in a single shot as they walk out of each other’s lives, has a heartbreaking abruptness. 

Twelve years later, Nora (now played by Greta Lee), single, a playwright in New York, discovers that Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), an engineering student in Seoul, has been trying to contact her on Facebook. They connect on Skype and, for awhile, their catch-up banter is refreshing until Nora’s tentative questioning about where their platonic friendship is headed goes nowhere. This closes out the communication for another 12 years, until Hae Sung, on the outs with a girlfriend, makes it known he will be coming to New York for a week to visit Nora, who is now living in the East Village and married to Arthur (John Magaro), a novelist. 

If all this sounds like the set-up for a blubbery rom-com, it is Arthur himself, in discussing the visit with Nora, who sarcastically sums up the situation as “childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later and realize they were meant for each other.” He’s kidding, but he’s also not kidding.

“Past Lives” is much more unpredictable and emotionally complex than Arthur’s synopsis. At its best, in its openness to the vagaries of romantic experience, it reminded me of Richard Linklater’s sublime “Before Sunset.” Song has said the film is semiautobiographical, and it shows. Although at times technically wayward and dramatically diffuse, there is not a moment in it that does not bear the personal stamp of a lived-in connection. 

The meetings between Nora and Hae Sung – in parks and restaurants, or aboard a ferry passing the Statue of Liberty – have just the right melancholic undertone, and the two attractive actors are marvelous at distilling all the awkward silences and nervous laughter. Nora and Hae Sung still care for each other, but, especially for her, that care is more like a nostalgia for the girl she once was. She loves her husband, who deeply loves her. He tells her that when she is dreaming, she talks in her sleep in Korean, and that he wants to learn the language so he can feel closer to her in such moments. Magaro’s acting in this scene is peerless.

The Korean concept of In-Yun, which incorporates the idea that who we are now is a version of who we were in our past lives, figures explicitly in the film, but not in an overweeningly mystical way. “Past Lives” is ultimately an immigrant saga in the widest sense: It is saying that we are all refugees from a past that still holds us. What we leave behind is as much a part of who we are as what we take with us. 

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “Past Lives” is in select theaters starting June 2. It is rated PG-13 for some strong language.