PLAYTIME

“Past Lives” and “Squaring the Circle.”

- ANTHONY LANE

Teo Yoo and Greta Lee star in Celine Song’s début feature.

Back and forth we go, through time, in Celine Song’s début film, “Past Lives,” and there’s not a DeLorean in sight. After a brief opening scene, in a New York bar, the words “24 years earlier” appear onscreen. For a second, I misread “years” as “hours”—a more manageable flashback—but no, Song really is grabbing us by the hand and asking us to leap before we look.

The first leap takes us to Seoul, where Na Young (Seung-ah Moon), aged twelve, lives with her parents and her sister. She walks home from school with a boy, Hae Sung (Seung-min Yim), who, for once, has got better grades than she has. She could not be more annoyed. He calls her a psycho, as if that were a quality to be admired. The two of them go on a playdate, climbing on chunky sculptures in a park, their faces vanishing and coming back into view—a hint of the transience that will lend the film an air of cheerfully worried fragility.