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Review | Berlin 2023: Past Lives movie review – Greta Lee, Teo Yoo play childhood sweethearts in Celine Song’s touching romance about first loves
- Greta Lee and Teo Yoo play Nora and Hae Sung, childhood sweethearts in Korea who are separated when Nora moves to Canada
- They reconnect on Skype after 12 years, and finally meet in person 24 years later, in New York, in a story that will touch your soul
Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
4/5 stars
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A gentle, touching romance about first loves, and the destinies we carve out for ourselves, Celine Song’s Past Lives is an elegantly handled sliding doors story.
Like 2021’s Minari, this simply told Korean-American tear-jerker has huge awards potential, particularly for its central performances from a trio of actors who understand their characters on a deeply emotional level.
It starts, briefly, with a shot of all three in a bar, as an unseen observer ponders who they might be and what their relationship is. One is Arthur (John Magaro), a Jewish New Yorker. The others are both Korean, Nora (Russian Doll’s Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo).
What are their connections to each other? Song then winds the clock back 24 years to begin her explanation.
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As children in Korea, Hae Sung and Nora – then called Na Young, before she Americanised her name – were friends, until Nora’s parents decided to move to Canada.
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