Past Lives (2023, Song)
Past Lives is last year's anointed Sundance Darling, and it's a category to which I am not entirely allergic. Beasts of the Southern Wild, Whiplash, and Minari are all films I love. But for every victory there's a maudlin and sycophantic movie that inexplicably gets wildly acclaimed and unjustly catapulted into the mainstream consciousness.
No, Past Lives is not that bad. But its respectful distance from its characters and lyrical artifice lend it a quality of airlessness. It's a film which suffocates itself, like when the subway turns just so, so we can see one character, staring affectionately, but at who, or what? And then we see the character he's staring.
It does make NYC look pretty, I'll give it that. It’s cool to see NY through the eyes of a longtime resident and a tourist, but there’s no real formal tension as a result. It strives to sustain the searing, heart-fluttering, thunderclap emotionality of Wong Kar-wai or Moonlight across 105 minutes, but what works about Moonlight, for example, is that it doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve until the climax. The movie itself withholds, not just the characters, and pays dividends on the emotional investment we make on its carefully-executed refusal to offer catharsis. Past Lives begs us to feel that deep reservoir of passion these characters can't express.
Song’s approach does pay off occasionally, however. In front of the merry-go-round, staring away from each other and stealing glances, I feel the weight of 24 years gone by. And when our leads talk, he still locked in an adolescent fantasy and she firmly grounded in the present—it’s rich. The distance slowly closes as these characters open up to each other. Yet while I enjoy some of the small moments, and the overall framing of the relationship as a lifes-long one, I can't help but reject the core premise--that after two-and-a-half decades, these two have an unshakable bond that bad luck got in the way of. Or if you're going to try to sell me on that premise, then at least I should leave the movie with a sense of yearning. The limp pair of last shots do nothing to advance this feeling: Nora, returning to her life with her husband--literally closing the door on Hae Sung—and Hae Sung, sulking in an Uber on his way to JFK.
Sharon Van Etten’s “Quiet Eyes” credits song, though? Incredible. 99.9% of the time these songs are inoffensive at best (EEAAO), but more often bog down the preceding film with tacky sentimentality (U2‘s for Gangs of New York comes to mind). "Quiet Eyes" is a smoldering masterwork.
