The movie ripples with the quiet melodrama of real life, the way big things often happen in the margins, and small things gradually come to mean the world. There are no villains here no one lashes out or behaves badly. Song has said the story she tells in Past Lives is semiautobiographical, and that’s easy to believe. When Hae Sung shows up in New York, Nora begins to wonder if she’s made all the right choices in her life, asking the kinds of questions that can knock anyone’s world off its axis. She’d been close friends with him in childhood, before she and her family emigrated from South Korea to Canada they’d reconnected briefly as adults, if only via Skype, but a romance seemed impossible.

In Celine Song’s extraordinary debut film, Nora ( Greta Lee), a playwright living in New York, married happily enough to fellow writer Arthur (John Magaro), finds her world rattled when a man from her past, Teo Yoo’s Hae Sung, suddenly re-enters her orbit. Malanda’s radiantly somber face, held by the camera with a kind of inquisitive tenderness as she tells her story on the stand, is the heart of the picture.

This is a perceptive and delicately unnerving work, a reflection on the way humans can instinctively reach out to one another even across seemingly uncrossable chasms. But as she listens to Laurence’s story, she begins to see the web of experience and feeling that connects her with her subject. Rama’s plan is to gather material for an updated retelling of Medea. Rama (Kayije Kagame), a professor and novelist, travels from Paris to the town of Saint-Omer to attend the trial of a woman named Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), accused of an unthinkable crime that she doesn’t deny. From that story, Diop has extracted a picture that’s both poetic and compassionately direct. French documentary filmmaker Alice Diop’s first fiction feature is based on a real-life French court case involving a Senegalese immigrant who left her 15-month-old daughter on a beach to die.

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