There are many films that talk about love, but there are not many that escape the hackneyed clichés. For that reason alone, the behind-the-scenes debut of playwright Celine Song already had many numbers to soften the hearts of American critics, who stood at her feet with an average of 97/100 on Rotten Tomatoes (calculated from 255 reviews ), which is equivalent, in the language of the platform, to “universal acclaim.” Past Lives opened in just 26 theaters and reached the top ten at the US box office, reaching 906 theaters at its peak. In our country, the reception has been no less warm. Let’s see why.
The independent producer and distributor, which has already won the Oscars twice – with Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), when all the envelope mess was going on, and last year with Everything at Once Everywhere, a film that It may be disconcerting, but unquestionably connected to the zeitgeist – it’s what makes the film already sound like an Oscar favorite. The label has been involved in some of the most important films of the millennium, such as Under the skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2014) or the diptych The Souvenir, by Joanna Hogg, and that has a clear appeal effect for new cinephiles.
Since the turn of the millennium, South Korea has been an unavoidable designation of origin for any film buff, a passion that reached its moment of greatest visibility with the phenomenon Parasites (Bong Joon-ho, 2019), which won the Palme d’Or and the Oscar for Best Picture. And Past Lives, an auto-fiction in which Song narrates how her alter ego, Nora (Greta Lee) leaves her native Korea, leaving behind her childhood love, Hae-sung (Teo Yoo), addresses this culture and its particular mystique. , around the concept of in-yeon (something like a prewritten destiny based on the Past Lives of the title), from the unprecedented perspective of a Korean with a Westernized outlook.
Far from the madding crowd, Past Lives is “simmering” (sic), a proposal that leaves space for the viewer, in keeping with those French films in which Gene Hackman of The Night Moves (1975) saw “the grass” (“dry the paint” in the v.o.). That is to say, the trend that has ended up being imposed in 21st century arthouse cinema: Past Lives is slow cinema for all audiences, as made clear by the final climax, a long sequence in which, during the time it takes an Uber arriving, apparently nothing happens, from the point of view of the action, although later the tears contradict it…
There’s a look at the camera from Nora at the end of the first scene, when Song has fun playing with our expectations of the three main characters, which challenges us as contemporary viewers, whether we’re in our thirties or not. And it’s like that throughout the movie: Who hasn’t looked for her first love when the networks appeared? Who hasn’t felt strange meeting someone after an intense virtual relationship? Who hasn’t weighed her romantic relationship to decide whether to move forward? Who has not wondered if the first love, impossible to forget, was not the real one? Past Lives poses universal questions with such intelligence, delicacy and honesty that it is impossible not to identify with the characters.
We said it at the beginning, there are not so many great love movies that transcend. A clear precedent could be the trilogy Before…, by Richard Linklater, because its protagonists also meet again from decade to decade, and because Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy were already talking about love and reincarnation on that train heading to Vienna. We could also think of another lilting story of impossible love like the unsurpassable In the Mood for Love (Won Kar Wai, 2000), although in this case the desire is left out of the field. Not out of a question of puritanism, or of castrating modesty, but rather to escape from the vulgar dramaturgy that tends to trivialize love, as if Song had wanted to vacuum pack it, to study it better: love, the film tells us, transcends the being together, in the line of loving each other, without being together, to which recently separated couples cling, in a present day marked by the sensitivity of the female gaze, of Celine/Nora, and the new masculinity of their partners, extremely attentive , prudent and trusting, totally opposed to the melodramatic outbursts to which we increasingly few survivors of the Middle Pleistocene engage. In the end, if Past Lives has touched the respectable bone, it is because it talks about what must be let go, even if we know that it will always, always, continue to be there. “A monument to renunciation”, as was already said in the pages of this newspaper, which is not conformism, but the recognition that (polyamory and other variants aside) it is not possible to lead several lives in one, no matter how much it hurts. .
