Playwright Celine Song makes her film debut with a beautiful, aching story about childhood sweethearts reconnecting
laywright Celine Song, who received acclaim for the unfortunately timed Endlings in 2020 , has made an extraordinarily accomplished feature debut. Her film, Past Lives, premiered to impassioned applause at this year’sDespite positioning itself as a festival for innovation and independence, Sundance’s films can feel a little mechanical, a tad inauthentic, carbon copies crafted in the shadows of those that have come before. “A Sundance movie” has turned from descriptor to genre.
We then move forward 12 years, with Nora in New York and Hae Sung living at home. Through Facebook, the pair reconnect and develop a Skype-based romance, fun at first but when they begin to realise that neither is planning to make a trip, Nora cuts things off. We end another 12 years after as Hae Sung is visiting New York and over a handful of days, he finally gets to see Nora again.
The leap from stage to screen has been treacherous for so many talented playwrights, awkwardly trying to transplant wordy monologues that can suffocate actors on film while keeping a too-narrow focus on a world that’s just opened up for them. But as writer, Song manages to keep her dialogue believably light-footed and spare while as director, she confidently and evocatively captures both cities with a breadth that belies her inexperience.
The brief scenes of the pair as kids have a bittersweet innocence to them while those as students manage to intricately convey the thrill and pain of long-distance romance . The final stretch in New York sees Nora living with her husband and Hae Sung finally making the trip he always said he might take. There’s a tangible magnetism between the two but also an awareness of who they now are and who they never became.
It’s an obvious product of exquisite writing but also of a raw, hard-to-find chemistry between two actors convincingly reading as 24 and 36. Lee has been the extremely funny scene-stealer in shows like Inside Amy Schumer and films like Sisters but shows how well she can flex an entirely different muscle with all of the things she does and doesn’t say and together with the lesser-known Yoo, they create the kind of heady yearning that melts off the screen.
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