Review: PAST LIVES

Three people at a bar. An Asian woman is flanked by an Asian man and a Euro-American. An offscreen pair speculate on the relationships of the three. They're guessing and giving their reasons and are no wiser than we. Then we flashback twenty-four years and kilometres of ocean to Seoul where a young family is preparing to emigrate to Canada. The older of the two children, wants a western sounding name. Her father gives her such and it is close to her Korean one, Lenore or Nora. Later, we see Nora walking with her school friend Jung. He's just beaten her at something academically and she's sulking. Later still, they're teenagers and getting closer. Then she's in New York as a young adult, beginning a literary career and he's slogging through his mandatory military service. One day Jung calls out through his Facebook page and she answers.

This sound like a lot of plot but plot is not what fuels this film. It is of the passing years and slides along in a near daily fashion, letting us know that what these people are going through, the decisions they are making about their careers and relationships are not above or outside of time. Time is a central concept in this story. It's not just the river of it carrying these people along or coursing past them, it's also in a Korean concept that refers to reincarnation and its effect on people gravitating toward each other across lives to eventually join, a kind of predestination by practice. The more Jung and Nora comminate with each other through their laptops the more remote the idea of their pairing becomes. Nora's career furnished her with a marriage while Jung drifts in various jobs back in Seoul. Jung's determination for an adult reunion with Nora finds him struggling with his own motivations. 

The stunningly rich photographic pallet of the film shows New York to one side of its iconic towers so that it seems little different from similar images of Seoul. Meanwhile, after Nora calls a moratorium on their communication the twelve year silence finds Jung still drifting and Nora advanced as a playwright in a marriage that not only looks happy enough but is respectful enough for the pair of them to talk candidly about Jung's imminent visit to New York. When that happens, the weight of the rest of the film which felt so slight begins to press and we begin to discover with the characters what has become of them through these long stretches.

If you read a synopsis of this and thought it sounded like a rom com or just a muted love story you'd be wrong on both counts. This is slow cinema. Not boring, slow. Slow like Bela Tarr or Jean Luc Godard who want you to take in an think about time and place as they fix their gaze on a wall or dip in and out of focus on a wagon ride for ten minutes while you consider where you are and what you've seen. You might well find yourself resisting the slowness to begin with. You really could have a go at conjugating verbs in a language you haven't spoked since high school, and miss almost nothing. But, if you haven't been checking in you'll miss the emotional seizure and breakdown of the final phase. All those long takes with so little dialogue or decisive action, they were the living we had to taste before we meet this strange junction. Then, with an other than obvious thought introduced in dialogue, something that turns the whimsical notion of the reincarnation concept into something more like a sentence, we understand and it is not what we expected nor (I'd bet) what we wanted.

This beautiful and powerful piece is the kind of essential reminder of cinema as a blank screen to be filled as film makers will, an unexpected gift that delights with both its surprise and the surprise that you needed it.