Past Lives review – delicately sad romantic drama is a real achievement | Sundance 2023

Playwright Celine Song, who received acclaim for the unfortunately timed Endlings in 2020 (it was forced to close just weeks after it opened), has made an extraordinarily accomplished feature debut. Her film, Past Lives, premiered to impassioned applause at this year’s Sundance film festival.

Despite positioning itself as a festival for innovation and independence, Sundance’s films can feel a little mechanical, a tad inauthentic, carbon copies crafted in the shadows of those that have come before. “A Sundance movie” has turned from descriptor to genre.

But Song has made exactly the kind of film that causes so many of us to trek through the Utah snow in hope, something that never feels anything less than true, harking back to thwarted love stories such as Brief Encounter and Weekend but remaining its own, special thing. In a cleverly reversed opening scene, we see Nora (Greta Lee), Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Arthur (John Magaro) being spoken about at a bar. The unseen voices play a game of strangers, speculating who the trio might be and what their connection is (it’s a game that’s been overused in romantic comedies in recent years but usually played by the leads). Try as they might, there’s no chance they could ever guess and so Song takes us back to explain, first to Seoul 24 years earlier as Nora and Hae Sung are classmates with an unspoken draw to one another. Whatever burgeoning pre-pubescent feelings they might have, they’re cut short when Nora and her family move to Canada.

We then move forward 12 years, with Nora in New York and Hae Sung living at home. Through Facebook, the pair reconnect and develop a Skype-based romance, fun at first but when they begin to realise that neither is planning to make a trip, Nora cuts things off. We end another 12 years after as Hae Sung is visiting New York and over a handful of days, he finally gets to see Nora again.

The leap from stage to screen has been treacherous for so many talented playwrights, awkwardly trying to transplant wordy monologues that can suffocate actors on film while keeping a too-narrow focus on a world that’s just opened up for them. But as writer, Song manages to keep her dialogue believably light-footed and spare while as director, she confidently and evocatively captures both cities with a breadth that belies her inexperience. It’s a beautiful, transporting film but one made with both feet firmly on the ground. Romantic movies as unashamed about their themes as this one, too often treat love and fate as overly mystical and ultimately impractical, allowing smart characters to act in stupid ways, but despite Song’s very title referring to a Korean notion of our past lives intertwining to draw us closer together in the present, she always remains clear-eyed about the reality of such thinking. In showing her characters as children, twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, we see how ideas of romance shift with time and experience, what we’re willing to believe in and we’re able to accept. Our idea of what love really is changes with us and there’s something unusually mature about how Song handles this way of thinking.

The brief scenes of the pair as kids have a bittersweet innocence to them while those as students manage to intricately convey the thrill and pain of long-distance romance (the changes you make, the calls you miss, the realisation you come to). The final stretch in New York sees Nora living with her husband (a refreshingly sensitive characterisation given the territory) and Hae Sung finally making the trip he always said he might take. There’s a tangible magnetism between the two but also an awareness of who they now are and who they never became. Song is a writer of elegant restraint and as the final act progressed, I worried that perhaps this restraint might end up a little too delicate for the years that have preceded and the feelings that have amassed. But then in a bar scene for the ages, we find ourselves floored, a slow buildup that finally hits like a bus. There’s a conversation of high emotion but also incredible practicality that one would find hard to watch without crumbling, tears inevitable.

It’s an obvious product of exquisite writing (Song also deftly weaves in a careful examination of the immigrant experience that never relies on lazy shortcuts) but also of a raw, hard-to-find chemistry between two actors convincingly reading as 24 and 36. Lee has been the extremely funny scene-stealer in shows like Inside Amy Schumer and films like Sisters but shows how well she can flex an entirely different muscle with all of the things she does and doesn’t say and together with the lesser-known Yoo, they create the kind of heady yearning that melts off the screen. If this is as good as Sundance gets this year then it’ll have been more than worth the trek.