The Media Tourist

Two lives connect with ancient mystical undertones in this love story that’s so much more than a love story

Teo Yoo and Greta Lee play childhood besties who meet again, years later, in ‘Past Lives.’

Past Lives
Starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro
Directed by Celine Song
Rated PG-13

In wide release Friday, June 23

A little Korean girl and a little Korean boy are schoolmates who grow up together, move apart and finally reunite many, many years later in this tender, emotionally resonant slice of life relationship drama that slices into life choices and the unseen, mystical and mysterious ties that bind.

Moon-Seung-ah leaves Korea with her family and changes her name to Nora, eventually working as a playwright in New York City, fixing her eyes on a Nobel Prize, a Pulitzer, maybe even a Tony. Hae Sung stays behind in Seoul, where he puts in his mandatory time in military service, then settles into adult life as an unlucky-in-love engineer.  

Celine Song, herself a playwright who immigrated as a child with her family from Korea to Toronto, now makes her bracingly confident, immensely impressive debut as a film director in this wonderfully nuanced, decades-spanning saga of connected, intersecting lives and a mojo referred to Korean culture as In-Yun, a force of destiny that brings people together in ways that transcend time, reaching deep even into their previous lives.

The movie is full of soft textures Song uses to help tell the story, subtle visual enhancements to the existential epic—a soggy New York skyline, a glowing silent sunrise, gentle breezes stirring window curtains, reflections in a puddle. It’s as if the characters are, indeed, players in a larger drama, a force of nature writ large in the elemental world around them.  

Greta Lee (from the TV series The Morning Show) is magnificent as grownup Nora, who settles into married life in the East Village life with a writer (John Magaro) she meets at a creative residency retreat. (The marriage, to an American, helped fast-track her immigration card, we learn.) When Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) comes to the Big Apple for a visit, the two Korean “kids” find themselves face-to-face, now as grownups, for the first time in 24 years. And the ol’ In-Yun fires up once again.

This isn’t a yarn of torrid passion, galloping emotion or clashing romantic rivalry. It’s not even really a conventional love story; it’s deeper and more profound than that. There are far more chaste hugs than kisses (of which I counted exactly one). There are no heroes, no villains. But you’ll find your own heart filling, swelling and yearning in this thought-provoking, full-of-feels tale about the choices we make, the choices that make us, what we did, what we didn’t do, and what we might have done. It’s about the yin and yang of everything that ultimately becomes the life we lead, where we end up, who we end up with, and who we turn out to be.

And what is love, anyway? “It’s complicated,” Hae Sung says at one point. It is, indeed.

During one scene, when Nora is workshopping a play she’s written, an actor reads her dialogue for a scene about crossing, passing from one thing into another, like walking over a bridge—or immigrating across an ocean. Some crossings, the actor says, cost more than others; you might get something you desire by making the crossing, but you’ll desire, even more, something you left behind. And “some crossings,” she says, “you pay for your entire life.” It’s certainly no coincidence that Nora and Hae Sung’s stateside reunion brings them underneath the towering Brooklyn Bridge, a large, looming representation of time and distance for them both.

John Magaro plays Nora’s American husband, Arthur.

Nora thinks about what she gained, the price she’s paid, when she moved away and made herself over in a new, Westernized world. She loves her husband, Arthur, who accepts the improbable, epic story of which he’s clearly become a part, but he frets that he might be fated to be on the outside looking in on a relationship that’s deeper than he can fathom. Hae Sung wonders if he will keep intersecting with his childhood friend, and perhaps his true eternal soulmate, in the future.

What does your future hold? Who have you met in the past, in memories that somehow keep coming back to the present? Is coincidence predestined? What price have you paid for the crossings, the changes you’ve made in your life? Who do you love? Past Lives will make you think—and perhaps make you realize that life, in all its rewards and even disappointments, can be so much bigger, and richer, than we can even imagine.

—Neil Pond