Past Lives review – a spine-tingling romance of lost chances

This supremely confident feature debut from Korean-Canadian writer-director Celine Song is a spine-tingling gem – a tale of not-so-brief encounters between star-crossed souls, played out over a period of 24 years. Combining the aching yearning of Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love with the casual intimacy of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, it paints a picture of unresolved affection as delicate as it is profound, interweaving timeless themes of fate and providence with more playfully down-to-earth musings on happenstance and shapeshifting identity. The result, which has one foot in South Korea and the other in North America, feels at times like an impossible mashup of Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul and Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle, shot through with a stoical melancholia that recalls the final scenes of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Yes, really.

We open in a New York bar, where an unseen patron asks: “Who do you think they are to each other?” Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner’s 35mm camera gazes in long shot at a trio of customers – South Korean Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), Korean-Canadian migrant Nora (Greta Lee) and Jewish American Arthur (John Magaro) – and the faceless voice has “no idea” how they might be related, whether as siblings, colleagues or lovers.

From here we spiral back 24 years to Seoul, where schoolfriends Na Young (Nora’s original name) and Hae Sung have a competitive connection. “He’s manly,” she declares, “I’ll probably marry him.” But her artistic parents have other plans, emigrating to Toronto, thereby separating the prospective sweethearts.

Twelve years later, the pair are reunited virtually via Facebook and Skype, sharing glitchy conversations conducted at opposite ends of the day, on opposite sides of the world. He’s done his military service and is studying engineering, while she has become a playwright. Together, they talk about everything and nothing – the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; how close they were as kids; how he would comfort her when she cried. Now in New York, she has stopped crying, partly because “nobody cared” and partly because she is no longer the person she used to be, having reinvented herself in a different time, a different culture.

When the Korean concept of in-yun (a personal connection transcending lifetimes) is explicitly invoked and discussed, Past Lives seems set to become a traditional “made for each other” romance with a familiar love-triangle twist. Yet Song is more interested in exploring how people change than how they stay together – how identity is defined as much by where we are now as who we were then. It’s no accident that when the film’s title appears on screen, the two words “Past” and “Lives” are separated by a great space. Together, those words mean one thing; apart, they imply another.

A further leap of 12 years brings us back to that bar, revisiting the opening scene from a different perspective – or, more accurately, from three differing perspectives. “We were just babies then,” Nora tells Hae Sung in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. “We’re not babies any more.” Later, with a diasporic flair that is both humorous and heartbreaking, she notes that Hae Sung is “So Korean. I feel so not Korean when I’m with him. But also more Korean…”

Related: The 20 best films about doomed love – ranked!

There’s something quite breathtaking about the deceptive ease with which Song’s first cinematic foray juggles the metaphysical and the matter-of-fact, conjuring a world in which every decision has transformative power, and concepts of love and friendship are at once mysteriously malleable yet oddly inevitable. Song may have previously been best known as a playwright, but on this evidence she has a glittering big-screen career ahead of her.

Plaudits to the principal cast, who do a miraculous job of portraying inner conflict and ecstasy with the merest tilt of a head, or subtle shift of a shoulder. Sublimely understated music by Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen completes the perfect picture, pitched somewhere between the lyrical piano themes of Eiko Ishibashi’s Drive My Car soundtrack and the rapturous oddness of Jon Brion’s work on Punch-Drunk Love, filled with tentative discovery, magical possibility and (most importantly) the bittersweet pang of truth.