First love is a tricky phenomenon to talk about, let alone capture onscreen. Almost everyone old enough to read film reviews in their spare time will have a specific face flash through their minds on hearing the phrase. But given the experience’s near-universality, there’s little a lover or a filmmaker can say about it without sounding painfully mundane. First love, especially as remembered, lives in hyper-specific details. And it doesn’t come to those who are ready for it—the potency is tangled up in the impossibility of its timing. Those twin barriers—language and time—are the primary obstacles to Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung’s (Teo Yoo) rekindled childhood romance in Celine Song’s feature debut, Past Lives. But they’re also the main adversaries with which Song—mostly successfully—wrestles as a director.

Past Lives begins with a long shot across a bar of a woman and two men (Nora, Hae Sung and Nora’s husband Arthur) drinking together while an unseen couple speculates about the trio’s relationship. Sister, brother, friend? Wife, husband, lover? What are they to each other? This sole voiceover encourages the audience to cling to the tiniest details of the image but, before we have time to take a guess, the scene ends. It will repeat later in the movie, only from a different angle; we never have the opportunity to fully retrace those first missed moments. We have to catch them as they come.

It’s a good lesson for the rest of the film, which is at its most achingly effective when Song’s camera obsesses over specificities like a lemon wedge in a saucer, hands on a subway pole, the patterns of traffic crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. Like the characters themselves, the filmmaking falters when Hae Sung and Nora try to put their feelings to words, which occasionally tips over into heightened dialogue that feels more appropriate to one of playwright Nora’s works than the intimate conversations onscreen.

But ultimately the pressure of time, not language, proves most difficult for both characters and director. Song gracefully elides the passage of first 12, then 24 years from the moment when 12-year-old Nora leaves Hae Sung in South Korea to the present day. But when the two finally do come together, their dynamic is so compelling and their onscreen meeting so comparatively brief that as the credits roll it seems as if some third part, some final meeting 36 years later, was left on the cutting room floor. Maybe that sense of absence intentionally echoes the bittersweet sting of first love. Maybe it’s simply the anxiety of an extremely methodical, early-career perfectionist director seeking relatively safe narrative ground. But if Past Lives leaves you wanting more, that seems a promise of significant future captivation to come from Song.

8

+Song’s gorgeous eye for detail; Greta Lee is the G.O.A.T.

-Some stage-y dialogue

Past Lives

Directed by Song

With Lee and Yoo

Violet Crown, CCA, PG-13, 105 min.