Celine Song is making her Hollywood debut as the director and screenwriter of a film that is her own autobiography, which talks about emigration, choices, losses and gains, in other words, it's a feature that focuses on memories. This type of project is on the rise in the independent film market, which has also attracted major filmmakers to do this type of exercise and project, my favorites being Spielberg's (The Fabelmans) and Paul Thomas Anderson's (Licorice Pizza).
Here we have a feature film made with a lot of love, dedication and enormous sensitivity, which doesn't sound generic, quite the opposite, and which has a refined technical quality, because every shot helps to tell this story, as is often said in the circles of critics and film lovers, more important than the plot is how this plot is told through the countless narrative elements that cinema provides, and here, for me, they all worked effectively, such as the intelligent and beautiful visual rhymes, the key changes at essential moments between open and closed shots, among other resources that are printed on the screen, and that sometimes won't be easy to notice, but when you do, the impact is much greater on your perception.
In the introductory scene of this movie, the camera places us as an observer of a situation, from a distance we follow three people, two men and a woman in a bar, right away we notice that the movie wants to induce us to some things, first try to identify the relationship between them, if there is a romantic situation, who is the romantic partner of the situation and who is the friend, visually it is a little clear the contrast in the characteristics of the characters, but this is the first teaching of the movie, that not everything is what it seems and that along the journey we will become more intimate with the story of these characters.
We go back 24 years and meet Na Yung and Hae Sung, two children who always live together, competing for the best grades at school and sharing dreams. Here we already notice several visual clues from the filmmaker that this is not going to be a story of a simple romance, because we always see the two of them saying goodbye at a fork in the road, he going up the stairs to one side and she going on flat ground to the other, which may indicate that Na Yung's path is more difficult, but she can see the top, while Hae Sung can't see the end, in other words, he's lost on his way? Between these plans we have the first break-up: Na Yung's family is going to immigrate to America, so the friends will have to say goodbye, but in the dialogue between the parents of the two, there's a phrase that hammers into our heads, which is “in life we always have to make choices, and we always lose something on the way, but we also always gain” we have faith and believe that what we will gain will be better, but life isn't like that, and often we have no way of correcting it if something goes wrong, there is no what if, we don't have multiple realities to live in for every decision we make, like in Matt Haig's book “The Midnight Library”, but what I believe is conveyed in the movie is that it will never be an easy decision to give up good things, people you love, to follow what you believe is best for you, but life charges a price, are we willing to pay it, whether it's good or bad?
In the feature we have two more time jumps of 12 years each, I don't want to spoil the film here, but basically our characters meet again initially through the internet and then meet in person, Na Yung is now called Nora and is a playwright and is married to a playwright who both live in New York, Hae Sung for his part is stabilized in life and has a girlfriend, but they both know that there are unfinished business between them, and that in the course of the plot they both had to make decisions that always made them drift apart. Nora is undoubtedly the one who has seen this relationship cause her the most doubts. While she was trying to write and get on with her life, she always had this foot in Korea, even verbalizing in the text that at times she found herself looking at the price of tickets to return, and here we have for me two of the best performances of its year of release, Greeta Lee as Nora and Teo Yoo as Hae Sung, a difficult job in which they bring out many layers through their facial expressions and the use of their entire bodies. There are repressed feelings from both of them that are not verbalized and you notice the discomfort when they are on stage, especially when they meet again 24 years after their first farewell.
Past Lives is a great drama film that has enormous merits, from being a feature film by a first-time director, but who demonstrates enormous sensitivity, together with her team, especially with the editing and photography, to the right choice of casting, it is a film that will impact each viewer differently, But its great asset is its focus on bringing us reflections, after all, leaving behind those we love, giving up a place, even if it's difficult and painful, has to be valued, we can sometimes not have the life we planned with our choices, but we have to be okay with ourselves that it was a choice made from the heart.
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