A half-hearted love story for a faithless millennium
This year’s Gotham Awards fiasco included giving a Best Feature Film prize to Past Lives, the directorial debut film of 35-year-old Korea-born Celine Song. It’s a Millennial twist on the star-crossed-lovers formula in which Seoul schoolmates reunite 22 years later – -after Nora (Greta Lee) has emigrated to New York and married Arthur (John Magaro), an East Village Jewish artist, while childhood friend Jung Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) has aged into a discontented bachelor. Song’s gimmick presents Nora and Hae Sung as figures of destiny, according to the Buddhist concept of In-Yun, which holds that the fate of two people is predetermined.
That’s right, it’s a doomed platonic love story. But the Gotham Film and Media Institute felt justified in honoring its Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (D.I.E.) virtues. Indie filmmaker Song is averse to the pleasures of emotive storytelling. Presuming that In-Yun surpasses traditional Western romance, Song goes for antipathetic lovelessness. Avoiding the Hollywood love story means refusing cisgender/heterosexual satisfaction. That’s what the Gothams prefer over great filmmaking.
Hollywood romantic icons may be in disrepute, but Greta Lee and Teo Yoo are dull, inexpressive performers whose emotions are as flat as the untrained subjects of a documentary (although they’re inert compared with reality-TV exhibitionists). Song’s opening scene establishes remoteness when unidentified voyeurs speculate negatively about Nora, her husband Arthur, and Hae Sung conversing at a bar. Flashbacks root the meeting in childhood. The anti-MAGA Gotham crowd can idealize their adolescent innocence, as if grade-school relationships lasted a lifetime or represented existential reality.
Actually, the In-Yun premise indicates Song’s modern faithlessness. Nora’s Westernized parents are shown listening to Leonard Cohen’s “That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” during the Seventies, but Song doesn’t relate to it. The fact that Nora and Hae Sung are unsuited to each other contradicts Cohen’s passionate regret. Unlike It’s Always Fair Weather, in which WWII combat soldiers who forgot their camaraderie discover they have nothing else in common, Nora and Hae Sung (and the tangential weakling Arthur) are lost — unsure of who they are or where they are existentially.
Multiculturalism has screwed them up. This D.I.E. triangle inadvertently confirms globalism’s nightmare. Song portrays no passion for yesteryear’s Korean home or for her current American situ. It’s an immigrant’s tale in the worst way. Her characters have no sense of their alienation either because it goes so deep or they’re so superficial. When Nora and Hae Sung depart, they say nothing to each other while waiting for an Uber to take him to the airport. Their muteness is deadening. Song doesn’t countenance Oriental politeness or urban American bonhomie. Hospitality, fractured by identity politics, counts for little, as the Gothams confirmed.
Hae Sung’s talk about In-Yun (“You and Arthur have the 8,000 layers of In-Yun. . . . You’re someone who stays.”) doesn’t have the nostalgia and longing of more intense and memorable movies. Hae Sung asks Nora, “What if this is a past life?” Yet Past Lives is not spiritual; its drab cynicism lacks the wonder found in every version of the musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (even Broadway’s recent LGBTQ revival), in which faith encourages human connection.
On a Clear Day is a definitive expression of our need to believe in life beyond the psychic distress of this travail. Has Song or anyone at the Gothams ever seen On a Clear Day or Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray) or any Antonioni film? The couple’s inability to articulate their alienation in Past Lives matches Song’s incompetence at visualizing it. Past Lives confirms the sorry state of our feeble, fatally disoriented and disconnected culture.