"You know you only speak in Korean when you talk in your sleep?"
"I do?"
"Yeah. You never sleep talk in English. You only dream in Korean."
"I didn't know that. You never told me that."
"Most of the time I think it's cute. Sometimes... I don't know. I guess I get scared."
"Scared of what?"
"You dream in a language that I can't understand. It's like there's this whole place inside of you where I can't go."
Usually, the moment the credits start rolling, with the obvious exception of Marvel movies, Indian audiences start walking out of the theatre. Sometimes, they’ll clap and you’ll hear lots of chatter as people head out, but this time it was different. Nobody got up immediately. The whole theatre was silent. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved a muscle. Only maybe 45 seconds into the credits did people begin to get up. There was barely any conversation. It felt like people were digesting what they had just seen and processing their feelings. Past Lives is one of those movies that stays with you in ways you didn't expect it to. It never, for a second, made me cry, or sob, or even misty-eyed. But it left this ginormous and heavy imprint on me.
Past Lives revolves around Na Young and Hae Sung. As children in South Korea, they shared a bond and crushed on each other. But circumstances and opportunity cause Na Young’s family to immigrate to Canada, leaving Hae Sung heartbroken. Twelve years later, Na Young has adopted the name Nora and is an aspiring playwright in New York City. Hae Sung is still in Korea, and has completed his mandatory military service and is studying to be an engineer. They reconnect for the first time in twelve years over Skype and talk for hours every day for a long period of time. However, Nora realises the difficulty in maintaining a relationship with someone on the other side of the globe and still advancing in her career in the Big Apple. Seeing as neither are willing to nip their young careers in the bud to work on their relationship, they stop talking to each other. Another twelve years pass. Nora is now married to a kind American writer, and Hae Sung is now part of the Korean workforce. Under the pretence of a vacation, Hae Sung travels to New York City and brings up old emotions and conversations.
It’s an almost reflex action for me to open Letterboxd (you can find me on it here) on my phone and grade a movie right after I’m done watching. But I just couldn’t get myself to. I couldn’t wrap my brain around what I watched, because honestly, my brain played no part. When anyone watches Past Lives, they watch it not with their eyes so much as their heart. Past Lives is a masterful exploration of human emotionality beyond this mere mortal’s understanding.
I have this term that I use for drama movies or any movie that’s trying to make me feel or understand something that’s intertwined with the human experience. I call it “Conversational Dissipation”. What’s dissipation, you ask? It’s a term I learnt in Physics class, of all places. Dissipation is the inevitable loss of some energy while converting energy from one form to the other. For example, when you turn on a lightbulb, you convert electric energy to light energy. But a bit of the electric energy is converted into heat energy, which is why a bulb that’s switched on is hot. You can’t get this energy back and it’s completely wasted. And it’s completely natural. The thing is, this happens in storytelling as well. However brilliant a storyteller you are, some part of what you are trying to say is lost, never to come back. The audience can see where you’re coming from, but they can’t feel every emotion you feel when you first put your pen to paper and sketched out the scene.
The greatest of filmmakers have extremely low CD. I’m not saying that each emotion is conveyed. I’m saying that 99% of emotions are. Instead of telling their audience what they feel, they reignite flames in their audiences that have stayed dormant for years. And debutante director Celine Song definitely looks to be one of them. I simply cannot believe that this is her first film. Song has a strong hold on her film and yet allows it to breathe and bloom on its own. She knows exactly when the audience needs time to process and waits for them, and in the meantime, captures some truly breathtaking shots and extends certain shots in a way that only a true artist could. She chooses to let the characters think independently and moulds them with absolute craftsmanship. Each character is deeply rooted and the roots of each character are intertwined in a delicate and sentimental manner. Although you can see references to certain movies sprinkled throughout the feature, Song cements it as her own movie.
Greta Lee, of Russian Doll and The Morning Show fame, excels in her role as Na Young/Nora. She brings this incredible gravitas to her role, and makes the inner workings of her character so transparently clear to the audience that she doesn't need to use any exposition whatsoever to explain her motives behind her actions.Her unique situation doesn't stop Lee from making Nora relatable to the audience and making them ask the question, “What would I do in her shoes?” Lee portrays Nora’s ambitiousness with ease and skill, and truly delves deep into her character. It’s the anguish of the heart that Lee perfectly hesitates to deal with. We’ve seen the ‘career vs love’ track so many times, but she brings a unique freshness and heart to it that we haven't seen at all. Her snub for Best Actress at the Oscars this year is absolutely catastrophic.
Teo Yoo is Hae Sung, through and through. Yoo essays the trials and tribulations of being a student and young man in Korea very well. While Nora is able to pursue being a playwright in New York City, Hae Sung goes through mandatory military service and an equally harsh education system. He finds solace in (extremely) late-night drinks with his friends, but his yearning to find Nora is visibly eating away at him. Later, when he visits the Big Apple, he convincingly portrays Hae Sung’s language barrier. He tries really, really hard to converse in English and adds this dollop of humour and reality to the film’s canvas. His scenes with Lee are an absolute beauty, as he plays a man deeply in love with a woman he cannot have.
The true dark horse here is John Magaro as Arthur, Nora’s husband. Typically, the husband in this sort of situation would be the worst person in the world. He’d be absent at home, extremely possessive of his wife and just a terribly villainous person. But then again, Celine Song is not a typical storyteller. Funnily, that’s even what Arthur thinks he should be in this situation. Arthur is an incredibly nice person who loves his wife more than life itself. He makes an effort to learn Korean to bond with his in-laws. Karmically speaking, he’s done absolutely nothing to find himself in such a situation. He brings unexpected comic relief and at the same time, delivers the big dramatic punches with such conviction.
Christopher Banks and Daniel Rossen’s heartbreaking and ethereal score coupled with the beautiful frames of cinematographer Shabier Kirchner create a resounding portrait that feels like a magical moving portrait of love and humanity straight out of Harry Potter. Each frame seems to be telling a small story in an overarching narrative, a sort of thesis by Celine Song and team on the tussle between head and heart. This truly is a movie not to be missed.
Past Lives is rooted in Korean symbolism and the culture’s idea of love: that soulmates meet in multiple past lives before they form a lasting bond. But it's true power comes from Song’s unique and nuanced understanding of modernity and traditions, creating this wonderful picture of emotionality that one must see to believe.
Comments
Post a Comment