Movies

Film festival favorite Past Lives is set for wide release this month and has deserved it all.

Distributed by A24, the ensemble production is written and directed by Korean-American playwright Celine Song, known in the theater world for inspirational projects such as her rendition of Chekhov's The Seagull in The Sims 4 video game.

Past Lives marks his directorial debut and reveals a stunning new creative voice in a film as complex and thoughtful as it gets. The film follows Nora, an elementary school girl growing up with her friend Hae Sung in Seoul, South Korea. Directly and beautifully played by Moon Seung Ah and Lim Seung Min, the children tease each other and their lives organically merge to form a bond that neither can shake.

Director Singer Nora comes from a creative family - a filmmaker father and an artist mother - ready to give up their careers for a new life in Canada. The film begins 24 years ago as the young friends drift apart and part ways with more sadness and loss than dialogue and more body language.

Twelve years later, Nora Moon (as she now calls herself and is played as an adult by Greta Lee) is an up-and-coming playwright living in New York. He is very focused on his writing career, previously saying he wants to win the Nobel Prize for Hae Sung (now played by Teo Yoo). While in Korea, this seemed impossible to him, and in the United States he willingly immersed himself in American academic culture. (Now he wants a Pulitzer, just kidding.)

Nora lives a legendary soul life. Meanwhile, still living in South Korea, Hae Sung begins a humble engineering career and lives up to the expectations placed upon him. One day he decides to contact Nora on Facebook after a post on her father's film page. Nora falls for him and grows close to him, which leads to a video call where they have fun talking to each other.

won't be​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ and and and close and tight, neither of them wants to part with their current lives, which justifies Nora that it would be too painful to continue. He devotes everything to their sorrow and invests in a creative relationship, which he introduces to Arthur (John Magaro), a young American writer.

Another 12 years passed before it closed again.

Not a costume per se, but describing the rest of the movie doesn't make sense. As in the first two chapters, the epilogue unfolds with tenderness and concern for the characters, honoring their love lives and raising difficult questions about fate and chance. The uncertainty is palpable, and the song plays with our assumptions and predictions, depicting the seemingly unpredictable scenarios of power. He eschews metaphors and instead delves into the mature hearts of the characters.

Cinematographer Shabir Kirchner often places the couple on opposite sides of the screen, shooting close-ups of parallel boxes that indicate the unseen forces that bind them together. In accordance with the themes, in the windows surrounded by a gentle gray sky, images are formed and reflected - melancholic postcards of everyday life. There is intrigue and complexity in this environment, a world of possibilities built upon one another.