Past Lives Review

Song's control is remarkable for a first film, opening with an eavesdropping frame in a bar that asks the audience to guess at three people's relationships, then rewinding twenty-four years to prove the guess wrong. The structure gives each reunion exactly the weight it earns and no more: the video calls of the middle section are shot as two people talking to laptops in different time zones, which is both funny and quietly devastating about how much of a life is now spent on a screen.

Greta Lee plays Nora as a woman who has made her choices and does not intend to apologise for them, and the film's real bravery is that it never pretends her marriage is a mistake. Teo Yoo does an enormous amount with stillness. John Magaro has the hardest role, a husband who is neither an obstacle nor a fool, and the scene where he names his own fear in bed is the most generous writing here. The film is slight by design and its ideas about fate are sentimental. The last walk to the car undoes all of that.