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Movie Review: Past Lives

Mike Tyrkus

After serving as a writer on the television series The Wheel of Time (2021), Celine Song delivers a memorable directorial debut – as well as penning her first feature screenplay – with the poignant and elegant Past Lives.

The film tells the tale of two close childhood friends – Nora (Seung-ah Moon) and Hae Sung (Seung-Min Yim) – who are separated when Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. Decades later, when the couple are fatefully reunited in New York, a grown Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), are forced to come to terms with their beliefs concerning destiny and the choices that make up an individual’s life.

As a first feature, Past Lives signals the arrival of a unique voice and talent in writer/director Celine Song. There is a transcendent quality within the interplay and dialogue between the characters of the film that makes their story both romantic and simultaneously heartbreaking. Song’s visual eye too shows an astute command of framing and composition that many filmmakers may aspire to their entire careers, let alone achieve in their debut features. There are numerous scenes where characters are separated by physical – as well as emotional – barriers that are presented with such grace that they feel nuanced and natural instead of orchestrated.

Both sets of actors who portray both young and older versions of Nora and Hae Sung are extremely effective in their given roles. But it is Greta Lee as the adult Nora who is allowed to truly shine as she comes to realize that the life she currently has is, in fact, the one she loves and that the idealized memories of the past that Teo Yoo’s adult Hae Sung has been clinging to are just that and not portents of the future. Both actors hold their own throughout and bring the characters as well as their emotional struggles to life in unexpected and rewarding ways.

Teo Yoo and Greta Lee in “Past Lives.”

Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography brings Song’s vision to life in a realistic, yet visually arresting way as shots seem effortlessly constructed from the architecture and scenery on hand and there is rarely a pairing of characters onscreen that doesn’t illustrate the separation and loneliness that is felt by them in one way or another. Keith Fraase’s editing moves the film along at a well-balanced pace that allows all the other aspects of the production to expertly coalesce.

As far as feature debuts go, writer/director Celine Song’s Past Lives suggests that a singular talent has arrived and that it is incumbent upon the audience to take notice.

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Mike Tyrkus

Editor in Chief at CinemaNerdz.com
An independent filmmaker, co-writer and director of over a dozen short films, the Editor in Chief of CinemaNerdz.com has spent much of the last three decades as a writer and editor specializing in biographical and critical reference sources in literature and the cinema, beginning in February 1991 reviewing films for his college newspaper. He was a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society, as well as the group's webmaster and one-time President for over a decade until the group ceased to exist. His contributions to film criticism can be found in Magill's Cinema Annual, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (of which he was the editor for nearly a decade until it too ceased to exist), the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, and the St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (on which he collaborated with editor Andrew Sarris). He has also appeared on the television program Critic LEE Speaking alongside Lee Thomas of FOX2 and Adam Graham, of The Detroit News. He currently lives in the Detroit area with his wife and their dogs.

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