Look before and after and pine for what is not

The couple of days Nora and Hae-sung spend getting to know each other again — even though they already do, intimately, in many ways — will recall any number of great fleeting romances: Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise most prominently, but also Woody Allen's Manhattan (Song makes no attempt to mask the visuals of that one), or even David Lean's classic 1945 Brief Encounter, the prototype of the subgenre. That said, Song's resistance to the big romantic gesture is, ironically, the film's biggest weakness. In being so emotionally measured and contrarian toward Hollywood rules, the film that, at the outset, looked like it was going to soar ultimately lands with a thud. The long dialogue-free stretches of Nora and Hae-sung gazing into each other's eyes tip over into creepy a couple of times, and the emotional veracity Song works so hard to create too often comes into conflict with the flowery verbosity of her characters.

Still, Song's film has a lot going for it. It's deceptively simple in its execution but touches on a number of ideas about the nature of love, the malleability of memory and the ability of the latter to impact the former. The time jumps in Past Lives give us, as well as Nora and Hae-sung, the scope to reconsider what we know as well as what we think we know about their emotional truth.

Past Lives is as much about the what-ifs as it is about accepting our choices and teaching ourselves to enjoy the moment and not fixate on what might have been. It's also about the vagaries of affection. Arthur quickly — and easily — comes to feel superfluous in his marriage because he can't match Hae-sung's good looks or his innate cultural understanding. Credit to Song for making Arthur behave like a grown-up who voices his insecurities rather than falling into Hollywood jealousy traps that generate drama for the sake of drama rather than tell us something about humanity.