How often have we speculated about people we’ve observed in a restaurant or a pub? Who’s partnered with who, what is their story?

This is exactly how PAST LIVES begins, a frame shot of three people, a Korean man, a Korean woman and a Caucasian male. An unseen voice muses who is partnered with who and the woman looks directly into the camera. And so the story starts.

We are then transported twenty four years into the past, the past lives of the Koreans, Nora and Jung Hae Sung, school kids with competitive streaks and an undeniable crush. It appears these Seoul mates are soul mates.

But her parents are immigrating to Canada and she is pragmatic about it. An aspiring writer she says that Nobel Prizes are not bestowed on Korea. He stays in place, does his National Service in the military, is subsumed by the mundane.

Twelve years transpire before contact is rekindled. He has instigated an internet search. She responds with setting up a Skype meet. There is a frisson of hope of reviving their friendship, a resuscitation of thwarted sweethearts, but the tyranny of distance and career path choices conspire to another dozen years of separation.

A quarter century elapses before they are physically reunited in a brief encounter. She has married, he has not. She has emigraed again, this time to New York. He has returned to Korea after studies in China and lives with his parents.

In their courting phase, Nora has told her once and future husband, Arthur, about the Korean concept of in-yun, the idea that even the most casual brush with another being is the byproduct of ties shared in past lives. That idea reverberates and resonates through this very affecting narrative.

Writer director Celine Song’s film is sublime in its simplicity, supple in its nuance, svelte in its telling. Greta Lee as Nora, Teo Yoo as Jung Hae Sung and John Magaro as Arthur give authentically rendered performances.

Ear opening, eye opening, jaw dropping in its execution, PAST LIVES is a film for grown ups – it honours the past without usurping the present or the future, a glimpse of the myriad accommodations of the vast hotel that is the human heart.