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‘Past Lives’ Review: Celine Song’s Elegant And Mesmerizing Film About Love In The Modern Age – Sundance Film Festival

The word “romantic” doesn’t have much place in cinema these days, serving mostly as a modifier for “comedy.” The term “women’s picture” has also passed out of favor since its ’40s heyday, regardless of the fact that the films that exemplified it usually featured strong female characters and almost always pushed back at the pressures of male-run society. With her feature debut Past Lives, which screened to a double standing ovation this week in the Premieres strand at Sundance, playwright Celine Song has killed two birds with one stone, creating an elegant and unexpectedly mesmerizing character piece that speaks profoundly to the concept of love in the modern age while using an intelligent and ambitious, but still very relatable woman to do so.

Surprisingly, the film comes from A24, whose recent output has been heading in a very different and more genre-focused direction, and also Killer Films, historically known for much edgier fare. But Killer’s long-standing relationship with Todd Haynes might be more significant here; there’s a nostalgic mood to Past Lives, one that recalls the Velvet Goldmine director’s conceptual experiments, and though it is roughly set in the present, Song’s film has a strangely old-fashioned air to it. It recalls not just the mid-20th century but that magical period in the late-1980s/’90s when the indie world seemed wide open, when Chantal Akerman could get money to put William Hurt and Juliette Binoche in A Couch in New York, Merchant-Ivory could adapt Tama Janowitz’s hipster novel Slaves of New York, and Alan Rudolph was allowed to make, well, anything at all.

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At its core, Past Lives is In the Mood For Love in the time of Skype, a lovely touch that brings its own Proustian rush when the chimes are heard. But the lovers here, if they really are true lovers at all, are separated by much more than convention. The film opens with an intriguing image. Three people are at a New York bar, two of them are Korean, chatting intently, while the third is a westerner, clearly excluded.

So what’s the story? Spanning decades and continents over a crisp 106 minutes, Song’s film starts with two Seoul schoolfriends, showing how, as a child, Young Na has a crush on her schoolmate Hae Sung, but willingly leaves him behind when her bohemian parents move to Canada. Years later, Young Na becomes Nora (Greta Lee), a successful writer in New York, while Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) stays in Korea, where he does national service and becomes an engineer. Nevertheless, despite their different paths, there is a dormant bond that is reawakened when Nora looks up her old crush on Facebook.

There are calls, and more calls, but Nora becomes frustrated when it becomes apparent that their clashing work schedules and lifestyles make it seem pretty unlikely that they will ever be able to meet. So Nora pulls the plug, instead pursuing an odd-couple relationship with Arthur (John Magaro), the author of a novel called Boner and a bit of a Charlie Kaufman lookalike, which may or may not reflect Nora’s perhaps significant affection for his film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But Song’s film does not end there, and this is where the film comes into its element: when, after 12 years of silence, Hae Sung decides to visit, how will Nora deal with this disruption from the past?

Song handles this tension beautifully. Rejecting entirely the cliché of a woman torn between two lovers, Past Lives sends Nora on a journey of self-discovery that actually takes her to some interesting places. By the end, we know that Nora “wants to do everything, wants to have everything,” and that she feels “so NOT Korean” when she’s with Hae Sung, who always looks like a town mouse in Manhattan even though he’s from a big city himself. But there’s no cliffhanger as such; Song draws us into wanting what’s right not just for Nora but Hae Sung, and rather than a melodramatic Sophie’s Choice scenario we get a thoughtful working through of a complicated situation.

Somewhat distracting us from the incredible chemistry between the two leads, Magaro does get in the way a bit in the later scenes, taking the film into digressive and slightly alienating conversations about artistic rivalry and East Village property prices. Which may be part of the point. But Past Lives quickly recovers, and its spellbinding final scene will satisfy anyone jonesing since the last sighting of Richard Linklater’s Jesse and Celine and wondering where that next bolt of cinematic lightning will come from.

Title: Past Lives
Distributor: A24
Festival: Sundance (Premieres)
Director-screenwriter: Celine Song
Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 1 hr 46 min

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