It’s third grade, and your teacher sits you next to a random boy. You’re strangers; you don’t want to sit by him. But, over the next few months, you begin to notice how he always sharpens your pencil when he goes up to sharpen his, and how he offhandedly offers you the strawberry fruit snacks tucked in his lunchbox. One rainy day, he even gives you his Batman umbrella because you forgot your own. It’s probably not love, but you’re 8, and it’s the closest thing you’ve ever felt to it. Now, you’re an adult, and you haven’t thought about — much less spoken to — that boy in years. But, there’s a part of you that wonders what would happen if you saw him again.
Celine Song’s directorial debut “Past Lives,” which releases nationwide today, June 23, centers on if your childhood sweetheart wasn’t just a memory and instead, pops up in your life after 20 years of separation. The A24 film drops the audience into the life of writer Nora (Greta Lee) along with her husband Arthur (John Magaro) who are visited by her former schoolmate Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) when he travels from South Korea to New York City on vacation. The film is an intimate affair that allows the fly-on-the-wall viewers into the trio’s life and zeroes in on quiet moments between the characters.
The film opens from an outsider perspective with off-screen voices playfully questioning how the trio is connected. Are the Asian man and woman siblings? Are they dating? Who’s the white man with them? This type of people-watching isn’t uncommon, and it’s something Song imagines she once fell victim to herself, she told Vulture last month. Sitting in a Manhattan speakeasy with her white husband and a former Korean sweetheart, Song could all but hear the thoughts of fellow customers, wondering who the trio were to one another.
Beyond this moment, the film finds many other similarities to Song’s actual life: Nora’s immigration from Korea to Canada and her career as a…
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