We’re in a bar in the East Village of New York City. It’s 4am and three people are perched at the other end of the bar: a Korean man, a Korean woman and a white man. Their conversation is halting, perhaps a little awkward, but also friendly and warm.

“Who do you think they are to each other?” a female voice asks. “Mmm, I don’t know,” muses a male voice in reply.

Suddenly, the woman looks up, her piercing gaze directed straight into the camera. She’s looking at all of us: the watchers from the other side of the bar and also the watchers on the other side of the screen.

So begins Past Lives, the powerful, pensive debut feature from writer-director Celine Song. 

This striking opening is, in fact, a recreation of a moment from Song’s own life: the very moment she was inspired to make the film.

“The film did really begin with this moment in my own life. I found myself in this bar in the East Village sitting between my childhood sweetheart, who had come to visit me from Korea, and my husband, whom I live with in New York City,” she tells me during a conversation in London. “I made eye contact with somebody who was clearly trying to figure out who we were to each other. I realised we were such a strange trio: one that had come together because of me. The first thing I thought was: ‘You’re never going to guess who we are to each other.’ And the second thought was: ‘Well, what if I actually did tell you? How would you feel about that? How would you feel about me not just giving you a quick answer but instead if I told you the whole story of how we ended up here?’”

That look, says Song, is also “about casting the audience as a detective on this mystery. And the mystery is: who are these three people to each other?” 

In Past Lives, Song tells a fictionalised version of her story. Na Young (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), are a pair of childhood sweethearts from South Korea. Although Na Young’s artistic, bohemian parents are in the midst of planning their emigration to Canada, they allow Na Young to go on one date with Hae Sung before whisking her away to Toronto.

Twelve years pass. Na Young, now known as Nora, is studying playwriting in New York City; Hae Sung has just finished his military service in Korea. They find each other online and begin Skyping back and forth. What follows is a painful dance of bad connections and pixelated images set to a score of the instantly recognisable bleeps of the Skype ringtone.

“The villain of the story really is the years and the Pacific Ocean [between them],” Song says. 

Song, who began her career as a playwright, knew that a film was the only way to effectively capture this villainous gaping void of time and space between Nora and Hae Sung. “It needed to be a film,” she says. “Because in theatre, time and space are figurative. You can just change the light and say ‘This is Seoul.’” This, she says, wouldn’t work for Nora and Hae Sung’s story. The cities had to be “tangible facts”.

“Nora is in New York and he’s in Korea,” she says. “We’re shooting those cities, because those [cities] are the villains.”

The all-too-familiar sounds and sights of early 2000s Skype – along with an added layer of white noise that was created by Song’s sound design team using an altered recording of the Pacific Ocean itself – helped to illustrate the pain and frustration of that distance. “While the technology stays the same, the human desire to get closer grows. You start wanting to reach in and touch each other and you start to become really frustrated. I think anybody who’s been in a long-distance relationship can connect to this.”

Song was committed to recreating the exasperation of long-distance Skype calls as accurately as possible. While most filmmakers would likely opt to shoot the two sides of the conversation separately, all of the Skype scenes were shot live, with Lee and Teo bouncing off not only each other but also the unreliability of Skype itself.

To achieve this, Song built two sets, connecting them with a cable. “Then we put a throttle on [the cable] – I was in a booth trying to make the connection worse.”

Eventually, the difficulties of conducting a relationship over Skype become impossible for Nora.

“I want us to stop talking for a while,” she tells Hae Sung, sitting in a dark room – the screen is so dark, he can barely see her. “I emigrated twice to be here in New York,” she goes on. “I want to accomplish something here. I want to commit to my life here, but I’m sitting around looking up flights to Seoul instead.” Now, Hae Sung’s screen is practically black, too.

And so, the pair part ways again. Another 12 years pass. Nora is now married to Arthur (John Magaro), a fellow writer she met on a retreat. Then, Hae Sung announces he’s finally coming to New York on vacation.

Arthur could have been the villain of this story – as a writer, he sees this for himself: “In the story I would be the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny,” he says. But this version of the story was neither an interesting nor an accurate portrayal of Song’s own experiences with the men in her life. What she does with his character instead is infinitely more interesting.

“When we talk about masculinity, we can often talk about it as something that’s toxic or something that’s brutal,” she says. “But the truth is that when I think of the masculinity in my life, it’s so much about being able to set aside their own needs and desires – it really is about the sacrifices you can make.”

Arthur is nothing if not understanding of Nora’s situation. And not only does he allow himself to be vulnerable and even openly insecure about Hae Sung’s arrival, he also does nothing to stand in the way of it. And this, Song believes, is more impressive than any display of masculine aggression could ever be.

“When Arthur and Hae Sung meet each other for the first time, the first thing that happens is Arthur says hello to him in Korean,” she says. “And Hae Sung says hello to Arthur in English.” For Song, this moment captures the type of masculinity that she values most. “It’s about how you can show up with your masculinity – and what really makes me feel connected to him is that he is at that moment able to say hello in Korean.”

Though the story may be told chronologically, Song takes a playful, flexible approach to time in the film.

“The truth is, time is linear. Time is just a relentless march,” she says. “But in our minds, in the way that we live our lives and the way we conceive of each other, it’s not linear at all. I wanted the time in the movie to pass the way that time feels to us subjectively.”

And so, Song plays with time’s structure, stretching it, compressing it and sometimes bending it backwards on itself.

When Nora and Hae Sung see each other again for the first time in 24 years, time seems to stretch to an eternity. “I wanted those two minutes to feel longer than the film.” But time also snaps backwards as the past comes rushing back. When they lock eyes, Song cuts to an image of their date as children in Korea. It flashes before their eyes as if it were yesterday.

“If I was to talk to somebody from your childhood, for a moment, I’m going to be able to see flashing before that person’s eyes a memory of when you were 12,” Song explains. “That person holds that secret of you. What an amazing thing – that some people in our lives hold that vision of [a past] you in their hearts. And it’s so vivid.”

This trick of the memory that can sometimes happen in our most profound relationships, Song says, gives us the power to hold onto past versions of others. Although time may march on relentlessly, our most powerful, prized memories can take us back in an instant. “We all have a little bit of a time traveller in us.”

To help the actors find the emotional truth of the reunion, Song asked Lee and Teo to avoid touching each other until the moment they hug for the first time as adults – like her set-up with the Skype cable, this was another ‘game’ she played with her actors to ensure their performances were as vibrant and fresh as possible.

“Just by playing this game, I’m playing with the actors. Their longing for that [touch] grows,” Song says. “It only makes sense in that scene, because the scene is about seeing each other for the first time and 24 years ago – the last time that they had physical touch – they were children. It’s helpful if there is a bit of longing built into it.”

Another game Song played was to keep Teo and Magaro apart until their characters met on screen.

“Their faces are the most important location of the whole film,” says Song of the trio at the centre of the film. “The sunrise and the sunset of their emotions as they look at each other – that has to tell the story,” she says. “So, I felt like it was absolutely essential that the actors are supported by having chances to experience things as they’re really doing them.”

There is certainly a lot riding on three actors – although the story of reunited childhood sweethearts may seem simple, thematically, it is endlessly layered and rich. Woven into this deceptively simple story is a poetic exploration of the grief that comes with confronting both our unlived lives and our unexplored relationships.

Although Hae Sung and Nora were never a couple, their connection runs deep.

“They’re like, not really exes. Are they friends? Well, friends are closer and friends talk to each other more. But they’re not strangers either,” says Song of Nora and Hae Sung’s indefinable relationship. “They’re not one thing. And what they feel for each other is so much deeper. It spans decades. There’s no word for who they are to each other that we can really think of, except for this word inyun that I know from having grown up in Korea.”

Inyun is an Eastern philosophy that describes those profound connections we have that seem to defy labels – that defy the constraints of time and space itself.

Nora explains it to Arthur when they first meet during their writer’s retreat in Montauk: “It means providence or fate,” she says. “But it’s specifically about relationships between people. I think it comes from Buddhism and reincarnation. It’s an inyun if two strangers even walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it’s because there’s been 8,000 layers of inyun over 8,000 lifetimes.”

The film reaches its emotional climax when the trio head to a bar in the East Village for a drink before Hae Sung’s flight back to Seoul – the same bar we glimpsed in the film’s opening moments. Nora and Hae Sung find comfort and closure from their shared understanding of inyun.

“I think there was something in our past lives,” she tells him. “Otherwise why would we be together here right now?” Perhaps they had a tumultuous affair, they muse. Or maybe they were joined in a political marriage. “Maybe we were just a bird and the branch it sat on one morning,” Nora adds. But in this life, they agree, it is Nora and Arthur who have 8,000 layers of shared inyun.

The complex, philosophical love story of Nora and Hae Sung, but also that of Nora and Arthur, are a lens through which Song ruminates on the multiple identities that emerge as part of the immigrant experience.

“As I was translating between these two people, in language and culture, I realised that I was also translating between two parts of my own self and my own history,” she says of her own story.

Nora is never fully known by either of the two men – as Arthur confesses, she speaks Korean in her sleep. “You dream in a language that I can’t understand,” he says.

It’s a fact that the trio all come to terms with by the end of Hae Sung’s visit. When Hae Sung and Arthur are briefly left alone at the bar, they speak of inyun again. “You and me…” says Hae Sung. “Yeah, you and I are inyun, too,” replies Arthur.

“What’s happening between these two men is that they actually both hold a key to this woman that they both love – and both have a key that the other guy doesn’t have,” says Song of the moment between the two men. “But instead of wrestling with each other or resenting each other or hating each other for having this key to her, they’re saying: ‘I’m glad you’re here. Only together are we able to make her whole and to see her whole.’”

By the time we reach the East Village bar the second time around, Nora’s pointed look to the audience carries a whole new meaning. The mystery of this trio’s relationship has, in a way, been answered. “Now, we know that the answer to the question [of who they are to each other] is more mysterious than the question itself.”

In the final scene, Song orchestrates a masterful emotional crescendo built upon the delicate emotional and philosophical journey she has taken us on throughout the film: as Nora and Hae Sung say farewell for a second time, Song cuts to their first goodbye as children in Korea.

“Of course, that first goodbye didn’t work. When you’re 12, how do you know what that goodbye even is?” she says. “When we see the two of them again in the flashback, what it’s meant to imply is that these two kids have been waiting to get their goodbye for 24 years – they’ve been on that corner, just waiting to get that goodbye.”

Song is now friends with her own childhood sweetheart. And perhaps with Past Lives, she too has found a way to say the goodbye to her past that she never had the chance to say.

Past Lives is available to rent and buy on digital platforms and to buy on Blu-ray and DVD now.

Images: Getty; A24; Studiocanal