'One day, without realizing it, you wake up in the soles of another you, one who inhabits an interstitial divide between two distinct worldviews.'
In “Past Lives,” playwright turned filmmaker Celine Song’s tenderhearted debut feature, cosmic forces align to bring together two former childhood sweethearts as adults. Nora left South Korea for Canada with her family as a 12-year-old, while Hae Sung stayed behind wondering if they would ever see each other again. Two decades later, they are finally in the same physical location again. Now a successful writer, Nora is married to a white American man.
It is that precise intersection between who you are here and who you would have been there that “Past Lives” embodies with a delicate exactitude. The film argues that identity is more amorphous and fluid than our rigid understanding of it would like to accept.