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Many people have been there – think they’ve found “the one” but life and other circumstances get in the way, meaning they ultimately drift apart. Then there’s some couples who have been childhood sweethearts, carving out their lives together for years. Past Lives, the feature directorial debut of Celine Song, is a beautiful film that explores how two people who lost and found each other after years apart and whether their separate paths are different journeys to the same destiny, or if their destinies are different but their paths just somehow cross. While recent Korean-language films such as Broker and Decision to Leave were great and had their own elements of complicated love, Past Lives surpasses them with its plot’s simplicity and its story’s richness.

Celine’s own past life shares some similarities with main character Na Young (Nora) – her family emigrated from South Korea to Canada when she was 12 and her father is a filmmaker, and she is now playwright and screenwriter herself. With simple yet classic cinematography, she captures the beauty and heartbreak of love – whether it’s spoken or unspoken, the looks and glances – both fleeting and longing – between Na Young and Hae Sung, and their body language – from the accidental brushing of hands to the big hugs, filling in the many more silences than there is dialogue in the film with chemistry-charged electricity in the air.

Throughout the film, especially when Na Young (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), reunite in person in New York 24 years after Na Young first left Korea, the two talk of “inyeon” – the ties between two people over the course of their lives, and what they meant to each other in past lives, especially lovers. For Hae Sung, he appears lost without Na Young in his life, whereas she is torn between two lives – the one she already has in NYC with her husband Arthur (who perhaps rightly feels more like a third wheel that Hae Sung would), and the other she could have had with Hae Sung. It’s a heart wrenching story full of ifs and buts that makes you long for a happy ending, yet at the same time is ultimately about friendship just as much as it is about love, because without the strong bond of friendship the two have, there would be no love.

Additionally, Past Lives resonates with the ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) diaspora on a level that few other films recently – one of the others being the very different Joy Ride – have. Particularly in Na Young’s case as she lives a married life with Arthur, she constantly wonders where she really belongs – and not just because of Hae Sung. It poses a rhetorical question as to whether immigrants – or even second and third generation children of immigrants – can and will truly blend in and connect with others in a country where they are not the ethnic majority and are still often perceived as foreign?

As far as romantic dramas go, Past Lives is one of the most captivating I’ve ever seen – be they Korean or not, despite its seemingly slow pace and lack of surprising twists and turns found in others. This shows that when you have as much talent and spark between two actors and that much emotion and depth in two characters as you do with Na Young/Greta Lee and Hae Sung/Teo Yoo, you don’t need it to be a story that is told over less than a year or has a dramatic turn that drives the lovers apart before the climax, which we’ve seen too often in too many films. Celine Song is sure to be put on the map as a filmmaker to watch out for as Past Lives deservedly continues to wow audiences and well their eyes.

Rating: 5/5

With thanks to the invitation to watch Past Lives at an exclusive screening in Manchester’s Everyman cinema from MilkTea Films (in collaboration with Voice ESEA for ESEA Heritage Month), which shows the best of East & Southeast Asian cinema in the UK.