*Fair Warning: Spoilers are here, breaking my promise, but just this once:
Day Two of ponderings (with gratitude toward @Filmspotting for helping nudge me to my current feeling for the film).
My reaction and thought process about the film Past Lives has changed like phases of the moon. So it’s appropriate that today’s Super Moon is time for me to declare Past Lives is a masterpiece. I realized my initial rants were a subconscious railing against reality, and my relating to Teo Yoo’s character.
Day One
The best films make you think for days and on that scale, Past Lives is a winner. While you’ll see my initial ventiing below, here’s a day later and calmer adulation:
Past Lives has some of the best succinct dialogue I’ve heard in a long time. And to Celine Song’s praise, she also had small well packed quiet moments encompassing large amounts of time that communicated so much in a compact space. My original review below which I also still stand on.
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I’ve got several takes on Past Lives written and directed by Celine Song. To preface, anytime a film is highly regarded (film festival buzz and one of my respected podcasters traveled an hour plus to see it) then expectations are raised to a sometimes impossible standard. Hence…
Let’s go with my cynical sarcastic take first: this is yet another ‘demeaning men’ film, glorifying a women’s needs over a man’s. I get it folks, women were second class citizens to well into the 70’s and we’re (girls) still financially trying to make it even (the Women’s Tennis Association will be paid equal prize money by 2027…big of them to wait 4 more years, but I digress) BUT in the last decade (or longer), women have become the Beyonce (aka “You’ll listen to me or suffer my wrath”) or another b word that rhymes with snitches. The old “HAPPY WIFE, HAPPY LIFE” is now tattooed on every groom headed to the aisle at the expense of his/their self-esteem. Think Will Smith, Kevin Costner, Alec Baldwin, the guy who stars in Bear, etc. etc. etc. And I get it, guys are afraid to become old incels without a woman to keep them warm at night, but at what price, gentlemen? Why do men love angry, domineering women?
In Past Lives, the main problem I had with the movie was the female half of the story (Greta Lee) showed one vulnerable moment and that wasn’t until three-quarters of the way in (bed scene with her husband). Otherwise, she was pushy, arrogant central. Even at their first Zoom meeting after 12 years, she tells the man who feels SHE is the love of his life, that she merely looked him up as a joke…OUCH. And can you imagine a role reversal for this film? Say in the last quarter, let’s switch out genders…the nice Jewish husband is now a nice Jewish wife and her self-centered Korean husband has his childhood sweetheart come to visit…AND then…he and the old gal pal converse in a foreign language completely ignoring the wife…AND then, she hugs and comforts him for feeling sad when she leaves??!! I can see the protests now!
Now let’s do a gentle cultural differences take: Past Lives is a film about one family’s immigration from Korea to the US to chase the American Dream at the expense of someone’s cultural identity and the relationships she/they could have had in their homeland. In Past Lives, the Korean man left behind (portrayed beautifully, but sadly by Teo Yoo) adapts his physicality to the perfect low-esteem body posture and weak willed mannerisms who longs for the teenage girl he fell for years ago. He’d do anything for this woman, but alas, one can never truly go back home or feel at home in their new place…stuck in a purgatory so to speak.
Now let’s do a spiritual romantic take: Past Lives refers to In-Yun, a theory that the people we have close encounters with are people we have had encounters with in past lives, hence the reason connection or spark(S) that occurs.
Last, let’s do a socially conscious, but yet tinged with cynicism take: Past Lives will be this year’s Everything Everywhere All at Once where the masses go gaga over exotic, foreign material, rather than look at films objectively.
On a technical level, the film was rather mundane in the Korea clips, the colors seemed so drab in the first act. The best shots were of water, reflections in puddles, stagnant water, turbo thrashing boat engine water. The music did not accentuate the emotion either and I’m a sucker for the string instruments, but alas I don’t recall hearing any.
Past Lives is worth seeing and trust me, I’m a gal who specializes in longing. I’d love to hear where where your take lies. Let me know, would you? At irun2eatpizza@hotmail.com
