It’s a very robust factor certainly to make a movie that’s without delay restrained and brimming with feeling, a film that may very well be pretty described as each massive and small. It’s a surprise, then, {that a} first-time filmmaker, one whose essential work is within the theater, might handle that feat so impressively. That’s what Celine Music has performed with Previous Lives, a dreamy and gently heartbreaking movie that premiered right here on the Sundance Movie Competition on Saturday.
Introducing the movie earlier than the premiere, Music instructed the viewers that Previous Lives is a really private story. Like Music, the movie’s protagonist, Nora (Greta Lee), is a New York Metropolis-based playwright who moved to Canada from Korea when she was a baby. What else is private concerning the movie can actually solely be inferred, however the delicate care with which Music has constructed Previous Lives suggests one thing carefully held for years.
The movie is a triptych, starting 24 years in the past in Seoul, the place Nora (then referred to as Na Younger, performed by Seung Ah Moon) awaits her household’s impending migration to Toronto. She’s acquired a detailed pal, a budding sweetheart perhaps, named Hae Sung (performed as a baby by Seung Min Yim, as an grownup by Teo Yoo), who it appears will miss her dearly. Children being youngsters, although, they don’t give themselves a lot of a goodbye. They merely half methods in the future after strolling residence from college, after which the newly minted Nora is off to her new life.
Music catches up with them 12 years later, then twentysomethings within the nascency of their maturity. Nora has moved to New York Metropolis, pursuing her playwriting desires, whereas Hae Sung has completed his necessary stint within the military and is again residence along with his dad and mom, working his method by engineering college. An opportunity Fb encounter brings the 2 pals again collectively. This part of the movie is close to fully a sequence of video chats between the 2, credible of their quotidian chatter however at all times buzzing with undertones of one thing bigger, extra significant.
Previous Lives is, befitting of Music’s career, a talky film, and is partly concerning the distances chasmed open and made smaller by language. Music manages to make this all very cinematic; there’s nothing stilted or stagey concerning the movie’s lengthy stretches of dialogue. It helps immensely that Music has a pure visible sensibility—the movie, shot by Shabier Kirchner, is achingly stunning, all watery blues and earthy greens and metropolis mild. The invaluable rating, by Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen and Christopher Bear, gracefully lilts round Hae Sung and Nora as they drift towards and away from each other.
It’s within the third portion of the movie, when Nora and Hae Sung are of their 30s, that Music calmly builds towards a panoramic emotional payoff. Nora is married, to a kindly author named Arthur (performed by the indie-film pixie mud in human type often called John Magaro), whereas Hae Sung is newly out of the connection and, maybe, again to softly pining for his good friend on the opposite aspect of the world. They lastly meet, for the primary time since they have been youngsters, in New York. Nora exhibits Hae Sung town whereas they discuss round this factor that they share, till it might probably now not go unaddressed.
All through the movie, Music incorporates a Korean time period, “In-Yun.” It’s an idea about human connection and, because the movie’s title suggests, previous lives. Via that concept, Nora and Hae Sung let themselves surprise about selection and future, probability and circumstance. Would they be collectively and in love had Nora not moved away all these years in the past? However who would they be if she hadn’t? Absolutely not the folks they’re now. Perhaps to vary that historical past would, then, be its personal sort of loss.
Music’s movie is concerning the resignation, the acceptance of misplaced issues, that turns into a defining a part of maturity. Previous Lives can also be, in a refined and poignant method, concerning the immigrant expertise, what it’s to depart one life behind—possible endlessly—in trade for one more. Previous Lives just isn’t involved with remorse. It’s as a substitute a considerate, humane rumination on what could also be mounted in private historical past however stays fluid within the thoughts.
Grownup Nora and Hae Sung are, in some methods, nonetheless 12 years previous. However in additional methods, they’re very a lot not. Their journey towards reconciling the information of themselves, who they have been and are, culminates in a pair of scenes that outline the movie’s melancholy spirit. Lee and Yoo are terrific all through the movie, nuanced and human and likable, however it’s in these closing moments that they’re actually given an opportunity to shine.
They so adeptly illustrate the quiet, cosmic craving passing between these two characters: all of their wistful, pragmatic grownup understanding mingling with an otherworldly sense that they’re floating on the winds of destiny. Previous Lives is modest and but huge in its consideration of the gradual modifications of life, of the previous ever whispering to the current. The movie is as auspicious a debut as one can hope to see at Sundance, the announcement of a filmmaker assured in her craft and beneficiant along with her coronary heart.
