Past Lives (2023, Celine Song) (Patreon)

57/100

First off, apologies, or perhaps condolences, to the Letterboxd member who twice asked when I planned to watch this, hoping that I'd love it as much as (s)he does. Get used to disappointment, friend. Longtime readers have learned to steel themselves, especially when it comes to highly acclaimed, very sincere dramas out of Sundance. Pretty fair odds I'm gonna wonder what all the fuss is about, at best damn it with faint praise (and then insist that some barely comparable under-the-radar film, e.g. Falcon Lake, is far superior).

That's Ed, Past Lives briefly seemed every bit the finely calibrated masterpiece that others have proclaimed it. Don't think I've seen a sharper opening scene all year, taking a screenwriter's go-to flirtation game—having characters speculate about the lives of total strangers in the same bar or restaurant—and transferring it to unseen extras who wonder aloud what this movie's three principals' fucking deal is. (Bonus points for having the first guess we hear be almost correct.) Seoul-set childhood sequence deftly sketches not only the formative relationship but also Na Young's / Nora's parents, who we never see again; a detail like Na Young and her sister being stopped at the study doorway ("Talk from over there"), presumably because Mom and Dad are both smoking, feels too accurate not to be someone's vivid memory. Song has a real knack for that sort of thing, and so we learn a lot about now-she's-Nora, without any big deal being made of it visually, from the fact that she's Sharpied the words KEYS PHONE WALLET directly onto the wall beside her apartment door, just above the light switch. (That's the kind of thing that I do, but only occasionally and not in such a permanent way.) I wouldn't call the film formally impressive, but it does boast the occasional superlative (if conceptually obvious) composition, like the divergent paths home that Na Young and Hae Sung take, with her climbing a much steeper grade. (See above.) She even pulls off a grandiose "oner" that's relaxed rather than show-offy, though both of the two images below in fact come from the same shot: 

(Sorry, folks reading this on Letterboxd like 17 years from now at my current transfer rate. You should've subscribed. Also, yes, those are the same two actors barely discernible at the bottom of the first still.) 

So there's plenty to admire. Yet Past Lives would have been a W/O for me, had I been at Sundance this year—I stuck with it only because there's basically zero doubt in my mind that it'll wind up on my list of 2023's most critically beloved commercial releases, which means that I'd feel obligated to go back and watch the whole thing anyway (as I recently did with The Lost Daughter and Sound of Metal, neither of which I much liked when I saw them in full). Partially, that's because my designated bailing point, one-third of the way through, fell immediately after the film's "middle section" (set roughly in 2011), which demonstrated yet again that it's nearly impossible to make Skype conversations cinematically compelling without going full Unfriended. But there's also a distinctly literary tenor to the dramaturgy proper—maybe I was influenced by Nora being a fiction writer, but everything about these character dynamics screams "short story" to me, and Song's efforts to demonstrate otherwise struck me as a bit sweaty. (I'm thinking in particular of the long, long, long silent parting look Nora and Hae Sung share. Maybe others swoon. I saw a Hail Mary pass, incomplete.) Did not help that Bear and Rossen's plangent ultra-indie score gets slathered all over virtually every scene, even though I like Grizzly Bear just fine. Magaro's role clarified things for me: This is a fundamentally tasteful weepie, scared to take any risks. That dude's so tediously, almost masochistically understanding and supportive that by the end I was dying for him to say something like "You know what, I think you should fuck him. Just do it, finally. But I want to watch." Anything to shatter the muted pall that had settled over these three people, whose collective deal turned out to be much less interesting than those anonymous folks at the bar had assumed/imagined. 

I totally got it: Arthur revealing that, despite being a longtime (native?) New Yorker, he's never been to the Statue of Liberty. Moved to New York in 1992 and I didn't go until I think it was 2008, and then only because my mom came to visit and she wanted to go. 

I totally didn't get it: Why call an Uber to an address that's way the hell down the block from where you are? Is that actually a thing (maybe to give the car a better place to pull over? not that Hae Sung would know), or was it just Song wanting some excuse to have Nora walk with Hae Sung in weighty silence and then walk back to a waiting Arthur?