“Past Lives”: a melodrama tipped for an Oscar
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In the Russian box office is one of the favorites of the season, a melodrama about a digital romance and loveless love by debutante Celine Son. The film has been tipped for success at the Oscars for a year now. This is a diligent but not very deep film, based on autobiographical material, which says a lot, if not about modern love, then about modern man.
Korean teenager Moon Young Na is preparing to become Nora Moon as she moves from Seoul to Ontario. Parents – a director and an artist – decided to conquer the New World and build a new life in Canada. Nora herself dreams of a writing career and approaches the upcoming move with restrained impatience. The fact remains that it is more difficult to get the Nobel Prize in Literature from Korea, according to the young money-grubber. If anyone is sad in light of Moon’s future departure, it’s his classmate, the good-looking Hae Sung, who is in love with the girl. 12 years will pass, and on the social network Facebook (owned by Meta, a recognized extremist organization and banned in the Russian Federation), Nora and Hae Sun, who once separated as teenagers, will meet again. They’ll start texting and start talking. After another 12 years, conversations on Skype will result in a face-to-face meeting – engineer Hae Sung will come to his high school sweetheart in New York to walk around the city with her and her husband Arthur.
Caressed during last year’s Sundance, shown at the festival in Berlin and since then remaining in the status of a benign option for all world awards, “Past Lives” during the current Oscar campaign acquired two significant nominations that mark the candidate as a big independent hit: “Best film” and “Best Screenplay”. All formal features are present. Here is a co-production of the A24 label beloved by younger moviegoers with the Korean giant CJ ENM, and a stellar cast by the standards of a relatively independent production – Theo Yoo as the suffering Hae-sung (from “Decisions to Leave”), Greta Lee as Nora (Maxine from “The Lives of a Matryoshka”Stella from “The Morning Show”) and John Magaro as the husband (remember how he baked clafoutis in “First cow”?). Thematically and visually, everything is also clear – global cross-cultural communication at its finest. The faded drama of modern platonic love on a distance is exquisitely shot on old-fashioned film to please the most sophisticated tastes of modern viewers, who will now be able to judge how beautiful a browser window looks in an analog interpretation.
Critics are delighted. Indeed, a movie about a flare-up of feelings and a lost chance for love is not such a frequent guest on the screen. Here, of course, I would like (and it is important) to remember truly great films like “In the Mood for Love” by Wong Kar-wai or “Before Sunrise” by Richard Linklater (he, however, had the passion to tell his story further – turning the beginning of a beautiful friendship into something more than just love ). You can continue to speculate, remembering Nora Ephron’s “Sleepless in Seattle” and feeling a little sad that today’s communication has lost the romantic mystery inherent in it before.
But you shouldn’t indulge your obliging memory so much. “Past Lives,” which exploits sentimentality, reeks of some kind of incorrigible cynicism of a person who long ago decided on life’s priorities and is unshakably confident in them. The main character, Nora, seems to be burning with one desire – to spend quality time at writer’s residencies and eventually receive the coveted prize (the fact that over time the dream of a Nobel in literature is modified into a dream of a Pulitzer only testifies to how diligent and sensible she is). we got the protagonist). The main character, Hae-sung, pacifies his sensuality with alcohol, studying Mandarin, and a career as an engineer. It may be stupid to criticize the narcissism of modern professional Nora or the passivity of Hae Sung, but still the viewer is within the conventional framework of the melodramatic genre, and it is quite difficult to empathize with the feelings of people who have not bothered to see each other in 12 years. Or maybe there were no special feelings? There was no earthly love or transcendental intimacy that they so often talk about when talking about “in-yeon” – the outlandish Korean concept of spiritual connection flowing from one reincarnation to another. But there were only ruined children’s plans, in which some of the viewers were able to discern the omnipresent trauma. The more the natives of Seoul, created for each other but invariably parting with each other, get lost in spiritual subtleties, the more you sympathize with the main victim of this film – Nora’s completely lost husband, Arthur.
Yes, perhaps, Arthur could be an excellent main character in this melodrama – but, alas, it was important for 35-year-old Celine Son, making her debut in film direction, to tell her own story. Born in Korea to a film director, she moved with her family to Ontario at age 12, where she first studied to become a psychologist and then became a playwright. She made her debut on Broadway during the difficult Covid times with a play based on semi-documentary material. Well, with regard to a documentary look at our digital reality, which promises the user serious psychological trauma with every closed video window and erased chat, “Past Lives” is certainly a successful statement. Only one question remains: what about love?
In theaters from February 29
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