Past Lives, a feature debut for writer/director Celine Song, opens with a simple premise. The camera focuses on a trio, a woman sitting in the middle of two men. Off-camera, voices try to puzzle out their connections: is this a couple and a friend? Siblings and a couple? Are any of the three romantically entangled at all? It’s a hard one, they muse.
Thus begins the dissection of relationships and the way they intersect in Past Lives. The film is built on a plot element as old as time – the love triangle – but this one is served up with a little less melodrama and a little more introspection than you might expect.
Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) grow up together in South Korea, too young to officially become a couple but just old enough for Nora to pronounce Hae Sung her “crush.” When Nora’s parents decide to emigrate from South Korea to Canada, Nora and Hae Sung lose touch, only to reconnect as adults on Facebook. Over the years, they weave between being in and out of touch, teetering on the edge of romance but too realistic about their geographical separation to pursue anything serious. When they finally meet for the first time as adults, Nora is married to Arthur (John Magaro), a fellow writer she lives with in New York, and Hae Sung is dealing with a fresh breakup. Their reunion stirs both a genuine chemistry and connection as well as a more philisophical question about the path not taken in their lives.
Most love triangle-centered movies feel like they orbit around the idea of picking a favorite coupling and rooting for it. Often, the film makes the choice for you, presenting the existing partner as either flippant and uninteresting or as downright abusive and neglectful. What makes Past Lives so interesting is its committment to telling a more ordinary, slice-of-life version of this trope. Nora’s husband even bemuses that he’d be the partner she needs to leave for a new, more exciting lover, as they lay in bed and wonder about the implication of Hae Sung’s random visit to New York.
From Nora’s perspective, Hae Sung’s sudden resurfacing in her life makes her question more than just her relationship with her husband. Love is a microscope used to explore identity. Hae Sung is so Korean, she explains, and being around him makes her feel both more Korean and less. His presence conjures questions about how her life would have turned out if she’d never left South Korea as a child, and which parts of her identity were there from the start vs. which ones were shaped by the culture in which she grew up.
One criticism of Past Lives is that while Nora’s “what if?” has a lot of weight behind it, the story feels flimsier from Hae Sung’s perspective. It’s easy to see why Nora fixates on the last marker of her life in South Korea. But for Hae Sung, Nora is a friend he hasn’t seen since before he was a teenager, and the brief glimpses we get of their childhood friendship don’t feel like enough to help us understand why Nora represents so much to him as The One Who Got Away.
Past Lives is an impressive debut from Celine Song, one that puts her on the map of auteurs to watch in the coming years. It intriciately weaves a story we’ve all seen with a universal question – what if? – and then personifies it further by exploring the way immigration and culture impact identity.
Past Lives releases in theaters June 16.