Lee and Yoo are electric together, conveying an excess of feelings both unspoken and not fully understood through their graceful exchange of looks and dialogue. Over the course of the next two decades, the pair reconnects online, fades apart again, and reconnects again in person when Hae Sung plans a trip to New York, where they have to grapple with the fact that neither of them is the person they were 20 years ago. At 12 years old, Nora immigrates to Canada with her family, leaving behind her life in Seoul, which includes her childhood crush Hae Sung. ![]() The film is highly autobiographical, with Song essentially rendering her own lived experience within the film as Nora. It is not a failed love story, but it is a lost love story, as its characters fall victim to the realities of time and circumstance and are left wondering what may have been if either of those things had been different. The things we decide for ourselves and those that are chosen for us, the people you know now and those you once knew, the feelings that fade and the ones that remain with achingly sharp clarity. In her debut feature, writer/director Celine Song proceeds to tell a decades-spanning love story preoccupied with all the ineluctable fine details of life that decide the destination of one’s adulthood. Are the Korean Nora and Hae Sung together? Are they tourists here with their white tour guide? Or are Nora and Arthur actually the ones together? Nora looks into the camera knowingly, as if to communicate what the viewer likely already knows: It could never be so simple. Right now, they’re probing the connections between three people: Nora (Lee), who is nestled between Hae Sung (Yoo) and Arthur (Magaro). Past Lives begins in a bar, with an unseen couple playing a game where they attempt to figure out the relationships of their fellow drinkers.
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