Post by Dracula on Jun 24, 2023 21:52:29 GMT -5
Past Lives(6/17/2023)
Sundance was kind of slow this year, at least as far as I could tell from reading along with the coverage from it. There was, however, one movie that clearly stood out as the winner and that was Celine Song’s Past Live, which certainly seemed like the kind of movie that Sundance was made for. That’s not to say that it’s “Sundancey” in that pejorative way we tended to use it in the early 2000s when the festival was littered with quirky comedies about twenty somethings finding their way out of small towns, but it also isn’t completely removed from that dynamic either. It lacks the quirk factor and attempts to cross over with comedy but it is a personal and clearly autobiographical movie largely set in present day America about reasonably affluent young-ish people, but it sets itself apart both in terms of its maturity and from the fact that it draws its story from someone with a story that’s a bit unique from what we used to get from that parade of young white men back in the day. In fact it was so well received at Sundance that it may well have been almost suffocatingly hyped (at least to the plugged in) leading up to its tricky summer limited release, to the point where what is in many ways a subdued and delicate movie has become and “event” rather than a “discovery” in a way that may almost overwhelm something like this.
The film focuses on a playwright living in New York who was born Na Young but now goes by the Anglicized name Nora (Greta Lee). We see in some extended flashbacks that Nora emigrated from South Korea when she was twelve but before leaving formed a bit of a connection with a boy she had a crush on named Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and went on one chaste date with him before leaving the country and him behind. Twelve years later (but still twelve years before the main narrative begins) the two of them reconnect through Googling each other’s names and finding one another on social media. Upon that re-connection the two have a number of conversations on Skype and get to know each other pretty well, but before it can really turn into something resembling a true romance Nora breaks it off to focus on her more local ambitions. She then met and married an American man named Arthur (John Magaro) who she met at a writer’s retreat and the two remain pretty happily married up to the present. That’s when the film’s main plot kicks in as Hae Sung has for the first time found himself traveling to the United States hoping to meet her again, perhaps in a desperate hope to reconnect or perhaps to put old feelings in the past. Nora is excited to meet him to some extent but of course the whole situation is awkward. Her husband wants to be supportive but having an ex ride in to hand with his wife is at least eyebrow raising and she just generally isn’t sure what feelings this will all lead to.
I’m not sure the whole extent of how much the events here were drawn from Celine Song’s life, but the broad strokes of her biography very closely resemble those of the film’s protagonist. Like Nora, Song emigrated from South Korea at twelve and then moved again to New York as an adult aspiring to work in theater and is also married to a Caucasian man who is himself a writer of some renown (Justin Kuritzkes, who wrote Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming film). I have no idea from my Wikipedia level research if there was actually a Hae Sung figure in her life, but even if there wasn’t it’s plainly apparent that this was a personal movie that draws heavily on her very real feelings about her immigrant experience along with other less specific human experiences. If this really was a situation she found herself in that may well have contributed to one of the film’s biggest strengths, namely that it feels very “adult” and down to earth in its dealing with the whole scenario. There are a million dumb and contrived directions this could have gone down to generate conflict and drama and the movie just dodges them like its Neo on the roof.
Song’s screenplay for Past Lives, while deeply honest and measured is in my eyes not quite perfect only in that it occasionally has its characters go a bit too far in just outright verbalize certain themes in the movie that maybe could have been left unsaid. The film’s use of the concept of "In-Yun" for example, is a good device, but she maybe didn’t need to have the characters explain directly to each other exactly how they think it applies to the situation at hand. But that’s mostly just a quibble and Song more than makes up for this with her execution of the material. She elicits very strong performances out of all three principal cast members, especially Greta Lee, unsurprisingly. One should not overlook what Song is able to accomplish behind the camera here either. She photographs New York with some lived in authenticity and she also populates it with extras a bit more carefully than what you’d normally see in a movie like this in service of her visual style, which is meant to be sort of distant a voyeuristic like you’re peeking in on the lives of three people from the outside and could just as easily be spying on any other random person on the street who may be living out a similarly fascinating experience. I’m not going to go all in on this movie and say it’s one of the absolute best this year has to offer, but compared to a lot of what we’ve been given so far this year… actually maybe it is.
****1/2 out of Five
Sundance was kind of slow this year, at least as far as I could tell from reading along with the coverage from it. There was, however, one movie that clearly stood out as the winner and that was Celine Song’s Past Live, which certainly seemed like the kind of movie that Sundance was made for. That’s not to say that it’s “Sundancey” in that pejorative way we tended to use it in the early 2000s when the festival was littered with quirky comedies about twenty somethings finding their way out of small towns, but it also isn’t completely removed from that dynamic either. It lacks the quirk factor and attempts to cross over with comedy but it is a personal and clearly autobiographical movie largely set in present day America about reasonably affluent young-ish people, but it sets itself apart both in terms of its maturity and from the fact that it draws its story from someone with a story that’s a bit unique from what we used to get from that parade of young white men back in the day. In fact it was so well received at Sundance that it may well have been almost suffocatingly hyped (at least to the plugged in) leading up to its tricky summer limited release, to the point where what is in many ways a subdued and delicate movie has become and “event” rather than a “discovery” in a way that may almost overwhelm something like this.
The film focuses on a playwright living in New York who was born Na Young but now goes by the Anglicized name Nora (Greta Lee). We see in some extended flashbacks that Nora emigrated from South Korea when she was twelve but before leaving formed a bit of a connection with a boy she had a crush on named Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and went on one chaste date with him before leaving the country and him behind. Twelve years later (but still twelve years before the main narrative begins) the two of them reconnect through Googling each other’s names and finding one another on social media. Upon that re-connection the two have a number of conversations on Skype and get to know each other pretty well, but before it can really turn into something resembling a true romance Nora breaks it off to focus on her more local ambitions. She then met and married an American man named Arthur (John Magaro) who she met at a writer’s retreat and the two remain pretty happily married up to the present. That’s when the film’s main plot kicks in as Hae Sung has for the first time found himself traveling to the United States hoping to meet her again, perhaps in a desperate hope to reconnect or perhaps to put old feelings in the past. Nora is excited to meet him to some extent but of course the whole situation is awkward. Her husband wants to be supportive but having an ex ride in to hand with his wife is at least eyebrow raising and she just generally isn’t sure what feelings this will all lead to.
I’m not sure the whole extent of how much the events here were drawn from Celine Song’s life, but the broad strokes of her biography very closely resemble those of the film’s protagonist. Like Nora, Song emigrated from South Korea at twelve and then moved again to New York as an adult aspiring to work in theater and is also married to a Caucasian man who is himself a writer of some renown (Justin Kuritzkes, who wrote Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming film). I have no idea from my Wikipedia level research if there was actually a Hae Sung figure in her life, but even if there wasn’t it’s plainly apparent that this was a personal movie that draws heavily on her very real feelings about her immigrant experience along with other less specific human experiences. If this really was a situation she found herself in that may well have contributed to one of the film’s biggest strengths, namely that it feels very “adult” and down to earth in its dealing with the whole scenario. There are a million dumb and contrived directions this could have gone down to generate conflict and drama and the movie just dodges them like its Neo on the roof.
Song’s screenplay for Past Lives, while deeply honest and measured is in my eyes not quite perfect only in that it occasionally has its characters go a bit too far in just outright verbalize certain themes in the movie that maybe could have been left unsaid. The film’s use of the concept of "In-Yun" for example, is a good device, but she maybe didn’t need to have the characters explain directly to each other exactly how they think it applies to the situation at hand. But that’s mostly just a quibble and Song more than makes up for this with her execution of the material. She elicits very strong performances out of all three principal cast members, especially Greta Lee, unsurprisingly. One should not overlook what Song is able to accomplish behind the camera here either. She photographs New York with some lived in authenticity and she also populates it with extras a bit more carefully than what you’d normally see in a movie like this in service of her visual style, which is meant to be sort of distant a voyeuristic like you’re peeking in on the lives of three people from the outside and could just as easily be spying on any other random person on the street who may be living out a similarly fascinating experience. I’m not going to go all in on this movie and say it’s one of the absolute best this year has to offer, but compared to a lot of what we’ve been given so far this year… actually maybe it is.
****1/2 out of Five
