Past Lives – first-look review

“You dream in a lan­guage I can’t under­stand,” Arthur (John Mag­a­ro) tells Nora (Gre­ta Lee) when com­ment­ing on how she only sleep talks in Kore­an. The two are nest­ed in the com­fort of their mar­i­tal bed, where long unspo­ken reser­va­tions can come out at last, the ten­der open­ness of their com­mu­ni­ca­tion a tes­ta­ment to the lov­ing nature of the relationship.

I dream in a lan­guage my hus­band can’t under­stand too. The open vow­els of my native Por­tuguese are at once vast and impen­e­tra­ble to a man raised with­in the tight con­fines of Eng­lish. The dreams we now share linger in the murky lim­bo that per­me­ates cross-cul­tur­al rela­tion­ships – the abyss we once believed to have bridged through the won­ders of mod­ern glob­al­i­sa­tion con­tract­ing and expand­ing as the years go by.

The thorny nuances of mul­ti­eth­nic rela­tion­ships are deeply under­stood by Celine Song’s direc­to­r­i­al debut, Past Lives. Nora – born in Seoul as Na Young – emi­grates to Cana­da at the age of 12, leav­ing behind her best friend and first love Hae Sung (Teo Yoo). Anoth­er twelve years go by before Hae Sung is able to track Nora down on social media, her West­ern­ised moniker a nag­ging imped­i­ment to their vir­tu­al reunion.

Because life rarely spares the well-mean­ing, many more nag­ging imped­i­ments stand between the pair, two lovers who nev­er were, caught in the rue­ful mis­for­tune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The first act of Past Lives is ded­i­cat­ed to lay­ing out the board for a game that only prop­er­ly begins to unspool when the slight­ly over­stretched set-up is fleshed out, with Song intro­duc­ing Arthur right after Nora and Hae Sung drift apart again as young adults, this time out of the real­i­sa­tion hope is far from enough emo­tion­al subsistence.

Arthur walks into Nora’s life in her dreams, quite lit­er­al­ly. He lands at a reclu­sive writ­ing retreat as Nora, already set­tled, takes a sies­ta, his arrival framed through her bed­room win­dow. The two quick­ly evolve from pleas­antries to open heart­ed con­fes­sions as the sun goes down and, by the time the dark­ness of coun­try­side nights envelops the two, it is as if their sto­ry has begun to be writ­ten in the stars hov­er­ing up above. They kiss ten­der­ly just moments after Nora tells Arthur about the Kore­an con­cept of in-yun, the idea that even the most casu­al brush with anoth­er being is the byprod­uct of ties shared in past lives.

If the roman­tic inklings of such mythol­o­gy fuelled their young love, the sober jad­ed­ness of matu­ri­ty has Arthur reframe their first meet­ing as mere bour­geois serendip­i­ty – an obser­va­tion drenched in earnest­ness instead of cru­el­ty. In this encom­pass­ing of how chance is a kinder help­ing hand than des­tiny, Past Lives unrav­els as a mar­vel, cement­ed in a rare bal­ance of wit and grief beau­ti­ful­ly embod­ied by Mag­a­ro and Lee.

Nora’s fas­ci­na­tion with her child­hood friend, who at once rein­forces and negates her her­itage, is no mys­tery to her hus­band. When Hae Sung even­tu­al­ly makes it to New York after anoth­er twelve years, there is no metaphor­i­cal white horse that can rock the stur­dy foun­da­tions that ground the rela­tion­ship at the cen­tre of Song’s debut – not the one between the star-crossed-lovers, but the one between two peo­ple who choose to live a life root­ed in the seren­i­ty of the present, not the oper­at­ic promis­es of the past.