A Love That Can Be at Once Platonic and Romantic
In Past Lives, distance and quiet are key to understanding a soaring intimacy.
This article contains spoilers for Past Lives.
In love, timing is pivotal. For the playwright turned first-time filmmaker Celine Song, the same holds true in the telling of a love story.
Song’s sweeping romance, , spans decades and crosses continents as it depicts a woman reconnecting with her childhood sweetheart, but it deploys a delicate rhythm of absence, distance, and silence. The film——follows Nora (played by Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), best friends in their youth who go their separate ways when Nora’s family moves from South Korea to Canada. They reconnect online as adults but fall out of touch again until Hae Sung visits Nora in New York, 24 years after the last time they saw each other in person. By then, she has
