Past Lives, review: this wondrous debut is the finest love story of the year

Nothing at the cinema this year has a hope of beating Past Lives for romantic delicacy, the cosmic yearning it puts into the three words, “I missed you.” It’s a wondrous, shiver-inducing film debut from the Canadian playwright Celine Song, who left Korea when she was 12. Deeply personal as her storytelling is here, it could unlock empathy from a bollard.

Two childhood sweethearts from Seoul, whom we meet in the late 1990s as they’re walking home from school, are reunited in adulthood, but they’ve been a world apart since Nora (Greta Lee) emigrated. She’s now married to a fellow writer in New York, Arthur (John Magaro), whom she met at an artists’ residence during one of two long periods when she and Hae-sung (Teo Yoo) lost touch. After changing her name, she’s been especially hard to track down, and only a coincidental Google of her old friend reconnects them.

The simplicity of the premise is quite disarming. On Hae-sung’s first ever visit, the conversations between these three speculate on kismet in ways that may remind you of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. Nora’s life, it’s clear, isn’t the only one etched irreversibly by her parents’ decision. 

How Arthur is placed – not as an obstacle, but an anxious third wheel – is deeply believable, and the language barrier crowds him out further, since Hae-sung’s minimal English (and Arthur’s minimal Korean) mean we alternate scenes in one language, then another.

Lee’s struggles for composure become as affecting as Yoo’s open vulnerability. They’re wonderful together, and Magaro’s wonderful on his own as Arthur, who gives them heroic latitude to catch up, and emerges as a figure so honest and crestfallen you can’t help but laugh. The trio are directed delicately enough by Song that their acting barely puts a foot wrong.