"Romance through the ages" is no groundbreaking concept for cinema, but tends to be a rewarding one — the audience gets to really know the couple, understand their values, appreciate their chemistry, and receive greater payoff (or more crushing heartbreak) when the credits roll. 

That's just as true in Past Lives, the first feature film from Celine Song, as it is in other starting-as-children classics like It's a Wonderful Life ("George Bailey, I'll love you 'til the day I die") and Slumdog Millionaire ("She could be our third musketeer!"). 

But in this 24-year mini-epic, the payoff takes longer, and is far more back-heavy in the movie's runtime, than in those better movies. 

After a clever first scene, featuring two narrators playing the classic "how do these strangers know each other?" game, we first meet protagonists Na Young and Hae Sung when they're ten or twelve years old and living as classmates and friends in Seoul. There's obvious early-childhood romance — they talk about one another to their parents and hypothesize they'll get married — but it's snuffed out when Na Young emigrates to Canada and the two lose touch. We then fast-forward twelve years, when Na Young (now Nora) is a writing student in New York and stumbles back across Hae Sung, who's just finished military service back in Korea, via Facebook.

The two have a whirlwind long-distance Skype situationship before Nora cuts it off to be more present in New York and focus on her writing. It's not until another twelve years later that they reconnect, when Hae Sung visits America for a fateful trip. 

Past Lives takes a long time to get up to speed — childhood scenes are fairly stock, and young adulthood ones not much less so — but it's here that things really pick up. Each scene is imbued with so much meaning and longing: a literally speechless reunification between Nora and Hae Sung (played with quiet hunkiness by Teo Yoo in his American debut); a deep and beautiful conversation in bed between Arthur (John Magaro, who's excellent as a forlorn and confused American) and Nora diving into the challenges of love and feeling that it's under attack; Hae Sung asking Nora about the prize she's gunning for these days, revealing altered priorities; a charged conversation over cocktails exposing shutout via language barrier; and an extremely powerful goodbye underscoring how much can be said with body language, small leans, and long pauses.

Throughout these older years Nora is played as an assimilated, type-A immigrant by Greta Lee, who does her best with a script that doesn't quite do her justice. Having glossed over her time in Toronto, we miss out on important characterization through her childhood, and now in New York, we never really learn what or how she wants to write. More details would have better clarified her inspirations, ambitions, and her adopted choice of coming to a country where she was better placed to succeed. Even Arthur's writer profile is better fleshed-out with a brief glance of his book, smirkingly titled Boner. But her facial expressions and line delivery make up for a relatively bare-bones background. 

Watching the movie in the Kips Bay AMC, I loved the scenes of New York that gave a more intimate view of the city than other films have: a small EV apartment (bathroom claustrophobically close to kitchen makes for a memorable scene of Arthur and Nora bristling against each other), a never-visited Statue of Liberty (those things are for tourists!), a long shot of my own former apartment along the East River. That level of characterization, offered to Nora and the first half of the movie, could have gone a long way.