The shortest day of the year complete. I am going to — briefly — talk about two films about love triangles.
Past Lives is perhaps the more buzzy film, and is playwright Celine Song’s directorial debut. Drawing on aspects of her own life, it centres a Korean girl who leaves Seoul for Toronto with her family, and then Toronto for New York for her writing career. In the film’s opening scene, present-day Nora is sat at a bar with two men and we hear a voice say that she, the voiceover and presumably a fellow patron drinking, is wondering what the trio’s relationship is to one another. We learn that the two men are her Korean classmate, Hae Sung, who she left behind aged 12 and her husband, Arthur, who she met on a residency. The film’s title is about the concept that we might have interacted with the same person a hundred or so times elsewhere, in our previous and future versions of ourselves. Sometimes when these two people meet it is on the right footing and they are true lovers. Is this connection between Hae Sung and Nora the closest they are going to get? If so, why did she shut the door to him just as they were reconnecting in adulthood, and shortly after found herself open to a viable, stable relationship with white American Arthur?
I adored some of the costuming, particularly of Nora in the film’s closing scene as she’s outside by a taxi. All three of the central performances are sincere and earned in their own way and Teo Yoo has a kind of classic screen handsomeness that I think sells his character’s relationship to a woman who ultimately left him behind to pursue a future she knew was capable if she committed herself to the present, rather than a long-distance Skype situation, a little more than the screenplay does at times. That opening scene — I wonder what those people are thinking over there — feels more like a creative writing exercise to unlock understanding about the characters’ perception of themselves and the outside world than it does something the audience needed to be privvy to, much less our first entrance into their world.
And here is the tricky thing. A lot of people adored Past Lives and it feels very tender to them. I do appreciate that; when I watched Blue is the Warmest Colour the scene where Adele and Emma reconnect and Emma remarks that she will always be fond of her former lover I was a total wreck. It is a particular cruelty, when someone feels an all-time love for someone who has felt something, certainly, but certainly not enough. Is it timing? Is it, in the case of Past Lives, a simple case of mismatched ambition and instinct? Either way, god do you sometimes wish it would work out. Make it work! Alas, it is not to be. We do get a lot of good work from this eternal frustration though, painful though it can be to watch it play out.
My least kind view around some of the Anglo-American reception of Past Lives is that the tone around its timelessness, beauty, that it taps into an ancient knowledge that supposedly can only be expressed in a foreign language…some of that feels distinctly and uncomfortably linked to the Asian-North Americanness of it all. It’s so funny because it’s hard to pinpoint what I’m discussing (and I know I promised this would be a quick one to match the sunlight hours but I guess I lied!) as it’s so often more to do with the arrangement of the adjectives than the specific adjectives themselves but I wonder if you can hear it too. Here’s Peter Bradshaw for The Guardian, for instance:
…as writers, Arthur and Na-young can see how Hae-sung, though a provincial country mouse compared to them, is actually incomparably more compelling and magnificent: a handsome, dignified, modest, heartbroken romantic hero who has sacrificed everything in his life for this distant real love.
Is it the ‘dignified’? Was the ‘dignified’ too much for me? I will admit to being pernickety. But I am frustratingly fixed on the details sometimes — I admit to be totally taken out of the film by some poorly directed extras who were engaged in an outrageously long display of affection by the Hudson River during a key moment when Nora (and she definitely is Nora by this point, and not Na Young) is taking Hae Sung around her adopted city.
Which leads me to the opening scene of Ira Sachs’ Passages where Tomas is being maddeningly meticulous unit directing a party crowd scene for a film project. Here comes the tension: the man who craves rigorous and deliberate action in his projects is about to embark on an affair of recklessly fluid proportions and he does so while cycling around Paris in his high-end threadbare knits. When his longterm partner, played by Ben Whishaw, leaves the wrap party a bit early, Tomas, understood by himself and those around him as gay, sleeps with a woman he meets on the very same dancefloor.
Between this, Tár and Anatomy of a Fall, it’s been a good year of me going to the cinema to watch Old Europe where everyone speaks English. As in Blue is the Warmest Colour, Adèle Exarchopoulos plays a teacher of young children and also someone slightly on the fringes of a bougie artistic crowd. I loved her in this, as I did all three of them. The film has yelp-out-loud funny moments and perhaps I’m being more positive about it than Past Lives because Passages is definitely not trying to be timeless or beautiful or universal, and therefore fewer people are going to see it. It’s about a pathetic love rat ruining people’s lives and turning up to meet the parents in a mesh top. It is riskier and, at a time when risk and seediness and everyday bad decisions feel increasingly harder to find on the big screen1, I’ve got to hand it Sachs for this one. Even though I do still prefer his earlier work, Little Men.
Passages received an NC-17 rating in the USA, which is the kiss of death in terms of distribution and it definitely was awarded that, rather than an R, because one of the key moments of the film is a gay, rather than straight, sex scene. And yes, I have been listening to Karina Longworth (that’s me) and her exploration of the erotic films of the 80s and 90s on her podcast, You Must Remember This.