Every now and then we get a new-star-in-the-firmament moment. It happened last year with Charlotte Wells’s celebrated Aftersun. Astronomical revelation comes again with this beautiful, slyly moving cinematic debut from an acclaimed playwright with connections to Korea, Canada and New York City. That notion of being a double immigrant – Celine Song was born in Seoul before moving to Ontario with her family at the age of 12 – is crucial to a film constantly in conversation with emotional and literal distance.
Song’s rigorous structuring does nothing to disrupt the film’s tender core. Past Lives starts with a youngish Asian woman talking to an Asian man in a New York bar. Another man sits slightly outside the conversation. The film sets out to put that relationship in context and to reassure us that a balance is at work.
We cut back 24 years to find schoolgirl Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) getting on swell with her pal Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim) in Seoul. They stroll about the city, aware Hae Sung must leave soon, and halt at a junction. One road leads Na Young up a flight of colourful steps. The other takes Hae Sung down a less interesting pathway. It is, for such an otherwise subtle work, a dangerously broad metaphor, but the film just about rides that risk into a sudden jolt towards young adulthood. Twelve years later, Nora (Greta Lee), as Na Young is now known in New York, comes across her old pal on Facebook. They spend some time chatting on Skype, but, eager to become a writer, Nora asks for some space, and they drift apart again. Another 12 years pass, and Hae Sung (now Teo Yoo) announces he is coming to New York and is eager to be shown around.
Song’s own screenplay does a fine job of not doing what you might expect it to do. By this stage Nora is living with her husband, Arthur (John Magaro), a writer, in an achingly fashionable corner of lower Manhattan. It feels as if Hae Sung’s arrival will, this being a movie, turn their lives upside down. Not really. There is a sense that she hasn’t been wholly honest about Hae Sung’s continuing interest in her, but Arthur remains impressively mature as, recalling the opening scenes, she walks her compatriot about a busy city.
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Past Lives is a film about how we can brush against the hugest emotions while maintaining exterior calm. Greta Lee, hitherto best known for her role in the series Russian Doll, communicates an ambient unease as, apparently all positivity, she deals with a human conduit to a faraway life not lived. Moving among two men who know largely discrete versions of her personality – the Korean child; the immigrant adult – she is on a journey to accepting one of life’s bittersweet compromises.
Along the way the film makes wry observations about changing patterns of communication and offers up gorgeous tribute to its host city. This story could not be told – not in this way, anyway – before the advent of the internet, and it is jarring to realise that Skype is now close to being a nostalgia generator. Ah, the blue remembered hills of 2010. Shooting on 35mm film, Shabier Kirchner, who did such good work on Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, finds a luscious, fluid New York to compare favourably with different beauties in Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. It is a film of high emotions and quiet conversations. It is a film that embraces blended nationalities while acknowledging the pull of one’s earliest home. One leaves aware of unavoidable open-endedness but sated by a work that has achieved all its lofty ambitions.
So, yes, a new star.
Past Lives is in cinemas from Thursday September 7th
