No Uncle Boonme, No Party

As a young cinephile, Korean cinema really opened up to me towards the end of the 2000s with the explosion of their twisted revenge thrillers, psychotic horrors and violent crime movies from the likes of Bong Joon Ho, Park Chan Wook, Kim Jee Woon, Na Hong-Jin and Park Hoon-Jung. After completing the catalogues of Scorsese and Tarantino it seemed the next logical step and finding such depraved titles was easy as it was all delivered to us neatly under the banner of 'Asia Extreme' from the Tartan film distribution company. A potentially controversial form of marketing with its exploitation of Asian weirdness. Truth is though, without it we wouldn't have been exposed to such great movies.

Naturally, it makes sense for us to now turn to exploring what female Korean directors have to offer. All part of A24s continued youthful hip appeal. Honestly, I'd be struggling to name talented female Korean directors. This is not even a question of tastes but an acceptance that in our present time they are yet to really emerge and explode in the west like the boys before them. It's only been in the last 20 years they did that too, we need to accept these things take time. Therefore, what we should be doing is tackling this issue by supporting their industry further to create greater opportunities for female filmmakers there. Promotion in the manufacture. The problem lies in when this strategy soon becomes let's celebrate the perceived progressive conditions of the films over the actual quality. I stand by: if we're not there yet, we're not there yet. So Let's not kid ourselves.

Past Lives is another shallow attempt from A24 at relevancy by picking at easy targets to win over the kids by tugging on heart strings and false progressivism. They're going down the drain rapidly. They've changed their strategy from weirdness for weird sake and not even that weird for a completely routine romance. Men and The Whale were dog shit too but at least they were amusingly awful in their desperate strains at success. Whereas, Past Lives is simply bland.

Since the trailer was so obvious in its intentions in presenting this cliched love story of a married woman who must choose between her current committed husband and childhood best friend, I was under the impression that somewhere along the line there would be subversion. Had to be right, considering the attention this film has been getting? You go in especting the usual format and secretly it's telling this whole other story beneath the surface that's far more interesting? Think again.

Two of my favourite romance films of all time are Hiroshima Mon Armour and Chungking Express. Both are romances with backdrop. Living on top of the ruins of the rubble or between two competing cultures. The characters in Hiroshima fear their traumatic pasts and the characters in Chungking Express fear their future. We have the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombings and the approaching handover of Hong Kong from the UK to China. These characters are trapped in their times and dealing with the wrongdoings of western cultures. So amongst this you get these battles for personal identity with the threat of outside influences. This all exists beneath the surface. You go in expecting by the book romance and you're hit with the full weight of history. Chungking Express and Hiroshima, those are fantastic romance movies.

Ultimately, the question you have to ask yourself with Past Lives is, how much does it teach us about the experience of being a Korean American? I propose this, it teaches us next to nothing about such an extraordinary cultural clash. Often, a technique to establish the definition of something is to show the other. What would the typical Korean lifestyle be like and what values do they hold? We never see all that much of Hae Sung or learn anything about him, especially considering the first hour is spent mainly in front of computer screens. Other than that we see him with his boys in a takeaway during the early hours of the morning after a night out. That's how takeaway expert Jacob Kelly spends every weekend, getting loaded on kebabs and various inedible looking rubbish that looks delightful after a drink but sadly is not. Sorry, how does that differ from the typical westerner's weekend?

There are no marks available to Past Lives when it comes to its unsubtle script (something even its supporters have picked up on). In the opening scene the themes are bluntly spelled out as an unknown narrator asks us to consider the love triangle before us, to challenge our cultural first impressions and work out who is Nora's boyfriend the American or the Korean. Aren't we supposed to visually make this connection? Where is the respect for audience's intelligence round here? If you thought the movie was off to a bad start there, wait because it gets worse.

John Magaro, who I thought was absolutely hilarious in The Many Saints of Newark as young Silvio Dante, is given some of the worst lines in film history on this occasion. I shit you not, this is a direct quote, "What a great story this is, childhood sweethearts who reconnect 20 years later and realise they were meant for each other. In the story, I would be the evil white American husband standing in the way of destiny". Ugly metatextuality masquerading as intelligence but really just substituting for a lack of intelligence? How disgusting.

In another clumsy scene, Nora brushes her teeth and passive aggressively rants to her American husband about her childhood friend. "He's just so Korean!", she blurts out repeatedly. What does that mean though? You have not shown me what that means? If it meant what it seemed to be suggesting, this is even worse because it was so arrogant and ethnocentric. Perhaps, you could accept it in a solid character study but this is all over the place.

Wong Kar Wai, Mr Romantic himself, goes all out when he depicts the selfidentity confusion of east and west in Hong Kong. There's the McDonalds looming in the backgrounds next to the local street food market stalls. There's the repeated close ups of clocks and sell by dates. There's the freeze frames at the brutal point of intimacy. There's Christopher Doyle's deliberately and gorgeously blurred and layered cinematography. There's the non-stop playlist of Mamas and Papa's California Dreamin' juxtaposed with Faye Wong bangers.

Where is the technique in Past Lives?

Because it's definitely not coming through on the tin eared script. Defenders will point out that it is a slow film of quiet glances. No, this is not a film hidden in the gazes or anything even close to that. Go back and watch Claire Denis's Beau Travail. A movie where every glance from a character, every head turn. That's the story. It's narrative through physicality and movement where dialogue only reveals so much. One where inner sexuality is hidden behind its characters eyes and subtle gestures. Celine Song doesn't have the same understanding of film as a purely visual medium.

These actors aren't good enough to carry across the sense of longing required for this kind of film to work. They gave me nothing with their faces. We're not dealing with real people as there's nothing to them. They're the template for a movie with none of the intricate details filled in. A twee score cannot hide the utter nothingness that lies within. Looking back at the stills from the film, all I see is glorified Google stock photos. The very type people edit in to memes and jokes. There is no genuine emotion in them. Nothing beautiful is captured. I didn't care for the characters because I didn't know who they were. There was no effort made to establish their connection. Flashbacks to their childhood may have helped. Although, I can understand this was going for more of a trust or belief in the abstract and flashback images may have cheapened that. It relied on something more spiritual which I never felt. Past Lives is both soulless and Seoulless.

Can Past Lives be enjoyed as a dumb rom com? Well, firstly, this is incredibly difficult because of how much it thinks it is above such trashy material. However, even as a routine romance this fails ridiculously. Locations do not vary. People spend their time in dark bedrooms speaking through laptops or engaging in shallow pillow talk. There's no spark or life to it because they're trying so hard to be this arty restrained anti-romance. Conversations are particularly dull and merely take you through the motions avoiding cultural discussion for standard set up in nearly every instance.

Structurally I cannot fathom Past Lives at all. It takes one hour of the running time to get to the question the trailer asks in the first place. Which man will she choose? There's very limited exchanges and a lack of intimacy with Hae Sung and so you never see their relationship build enough to feel the tension of the films question. The audience can only have faith in it because the filmmakers don't do anything to suggest a connection.

Typical rom coms can be guilty of being obvious and overly sentimental but they wear their emotions on their sleeve and there is no desire to deceive. Often, I even warm to the cheesiness of a pop song no matter how overused it may be. Past Lives is under the belief that is above all this and there is nothing more embarrassing than having that big ego, thinking you're all clever and then failing to deliver in going the alternative route. I can't help but think how much better this would have been if instead of spending one hour and the equivalent of two acts Skyping, they couldn't cover this in the first fifteen minutes and got Hae Sung to America quicker? Earlier this year, we got Are you There God, It's Me, Margaret?, which has its roots in girly book trash but completely managed to create this wonderful piece of pop art that was both wholesome and rich in its examination of a little girl torn between her parent's two religions. I much preferred its vibrancy and fast pace with the music selections. Past Lives works as neither art or a trashy rom com.

Back in 1996, when the shit Manc band Oasis won some award they probably shouldn't have won at the Brit Awards, in an on brand moment, they rudely mocked and called out their slightly less shitter Cockney rivals, Blur, by wishing to thank, "all the people, so many people" who "all go hand in hand through their shiteeeeee lives". This was the exact sentiment I had watching Past Lives. Also, I can't sign this one off without asking where was Uncle Boonme's fucking cameo?

Director: Celine Song

Screenplay: Celine Song

Cinematography: Shabier Kirchner

Music: Christopher Bear, Daniel Rossen

Production Company: CJ ENM

Distribution: A24

Country: USA

Run Time: 106 mins

Budget: 12 mil

Plot Synopsis: Two former friends sit and stare at each other over Skype for an hour. Eventually, they meet up and realise they have nothing to say to each other and go their separate ways once more

Bonus Points:

-Minus points only for Uncle Boonme's exclusion Overall

1/5