Past Lives (2023)

 

Past Lives (2023)

Director: Celine Song

Stars: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro

Short Review, no spoilers

Affairs limited by heart-wrenching barriers between would-be lovers are nothing new in drama, however Past Lives is a modern take on the kind that are devastating for their polite restraint. This one clings by a slender thread stretched across South Korea to the USA via stuttering video call connections and childhood memory, and is problematised by personal ambition and cultural difference. The intelligent performances of the two leads that are masterclasses in subtle emotional punch as well as character definition are worth the watch alone. It is also an illuminatingly personal perspective of migration and how it affects an individual psyche.

Full Review (spoilers)

Past Lives is a disarmingly small story told through several tendrils – through the poignancy of a love affair distanced by both time and geography; through the differences between one nation and another; and through distinct personalities that show influences of gender and culture but are nevertheless drawn to each other by something perhaps indefinable, maybe not even real in a flesh and blood sense.

At the beginning, Seung Ah Moon demonstrates the naïve brutality of a bold little girl that takes things as they come when she bids a flippant goodbye to a boy that she likes very much. To him it cuts much deeper. Later in life, she’s now Nora and flying high in New York when she stumbles upon a social media reach out from her long-lost friend and responds. They embark upon a relationship via regular video calls, which lasts until both have to call time as they respectively have personal ambitions they can’t ignore, and so ends a potentially powerful romance. Each drift in to committed relationships and know no more of each other until another 12 years pass and Hae Sung contacts Nora again – he’s broken up with a long-term girlfriend and has finally decided to come to New York, but it’s just a vacation as Nora assures her husband. Until she meets Hae Sung that is and with dubious/admirable candidness, tells husband Arthur that yes he has come specifically to see her, is an attractive man, and has stirred memories of the land she was born in but hasn’t seen since she left over 20 years previously. Naturally perhaps this is what an insecure Arthur hears most loudly when to be fair, Nora also speaks of the intensity of memory that inevitably stirs feelings that can be skewed and misinterpreted, as well as reassurances that she does indeed love her husband and is a practical woman who has no desire to throw her carefully assembled life away for one that could have but didn’t happen.

Dinner between the love triangle is excruciating, with Arthur firmly on the outside but hanging in there while the reunion plays out. This is no period drama with old-fashioned constraints, rather an apparently emotionally mature modern tale of restricted love where we are all to understand that of course you would choose career over love and dilute desire to make the sensible decisions in life. Arthur and Hae Sung are cordial with each other and Nora is seemingly breezy. She strolls away with Hae Sung to wait for his Uber and they stand together with barely a word, slowly turning towards each other until they are abruptly interrupted by the taxi. Nothing has happened, nothing will happen, but finally repression is crushed when Nora breaks down in tears and is comforted by Arthur waiting on the steps to their building. Arthur showed surprise when she told him she was always a cry-baby and had to be comforted by Hae Sung in the past, but now finally the visit from her long-lost love has opened up the person she used to be to the one who worries that he doesn’t know that side of her enough.

Past Lives is in some senses a very traditional romance, a story of lost love troubled by physical distance and social obstacles. It’s disguised by modern sensibilities and objects however, not only technology and geographical remoteness, but also the now commonly accepted drive for ambition and professionalism. In place of previous social restraints to love, passion, emotion, risk that came from above, we now appear to do it to ourselves.

Differences in cultural values are highlighted when Nora observes how ‘Korean Korean’ Hae Sung is, as opposed to American Korean, that he still lives with his parents, and Hae Sung tells the couple that work for him is hard as he does his boss’ work as well as his own, as is the accepted way in his home country. Both characters are associated with their opposing cultural values – Nora is creative, competitive and emotional while Hae Sung is associated with obedience and practicality. But lest there be any danger of superiority from the Westernised Nora over Hae Sung, it is worth noting that as wry, confident and career-successful as Nora is, it is Hae Sung that has the bravery and emotional disregard for risk to put himself out there alone, to make the grand romantic gesture, whereas Nora is never prepared to even go to Korea let alone open herself up to the possibility of a different life with perhaps the one she is meant to be with.

Of course there are always other possible readings, like perhaps Hae Sung is less a fully-fledged character and more a ghost-like fantasy figure that represents Nora’s longing for a part of herself left behind in the country of her birth. Either way, it is a beautifully performed piece, with Teo Yoo as Hae Sung particularly commendable. Sensitive but dignified, masculine but vulnerable, he is the image of solidity yet represents the intangibility of psychic loss.

Poor Things (2023)

 

Poor Things (2023)

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Stars: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef

Short Review, no spoilers

Who needs Barbie when you have Bella Baxter? Both are artificially constructed and both enter the ‘real’ world baffled by societal restrictions upon their femininity, but these two icons of empowerment differ wildly in their approach – while Barbie lapses in to existential crisis, Bella launches in to her circumstances with unapologetic lack of restraint. Emma Stone’s character is also a lot more fun and adult as a saucy and generally badly behaved Frankenstein’s monster in Yorgos Lanthimos’ version of Alasdair Gray’s novel. A well-cast and excellently performed, bawdy slice of artful eccentricity, Poor Things sits in arch light relief amongst its rivals for awards glory and deserves success.

Full Review (spoilers)

One of the most delightful aspects of Poor Things is it’s address to corporeality through both science and humour, which perhaps surprisingly helps us to view the human more humanely. Dr Godwin Baxter has salvaged a suicide victim from the river in to which she plunged herself and reanimated her using the brain of her unborn child. As dastardly as this sounds it is all part of a tenderly, objectively administered experiment, the results of which we bear witness to as the film unfolds. Opening in the household of the doctor and his ward, we see a tall and gothically attractive young woman with the mind of a child who is boisterous and unpredictable but nevertheless tended to with patience by the man himself as well as a housekeeper. Invited in to the fold is a young medical student to make notes on Bella’s progress while the busy doctor continues his day job, however Bella is rapidly growing from toddler state (disturbingly playful stabby stabby games in the doctor’s autopsy room) to an id-happy one - sexually aware, cognitively demanding and desperate to see more than the inside walls of the doctor’s house. In response, Dr Godwin decides that the average but kindly student Max can marry her as long as she stays behind closed doors, however the lawyer employed to draw up the contract is Super-Cad, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who immediately explores his sleazy curiosity by finding Bella in the house and poking her between the legs.

Again, the mad scientist who gave birth to all of this – affectionately called ‘God’ by Bella – proves himself to be less the control freak we may have expected when he reluctantly but reasonably allows Bella to leave. Henceforth an adventure in Lisbon with her equally randy accomplice – apparently though as Bella actually proves to be less vulnerable than expected and way too much for this notorious lover and leaver. Pushing Wedderburn’s limits beyond what he thought was controversial and leaving him as consternated as those he had used and abused himself, Bella enjoys and explores and Wedderburn loses his mind. There’s a dance scene during which Bella’s typical abandon matches weirdly and wonderfully with Wedderburn’s desperate attempts to temper it, resulting in a chaotically compelling display.

To his horror, Wedderburn finds himself besotted with Bella and the next man to try to imprison her. However, suit-casing her on to a cruise ship and trying to sell it as just the next step on the adventure she had so much wanted to embark upon, Bella is not fooled but disgruntled and instead finds expansion through philosophical thought from a couple of bohemians on board. This is also where she is first introduced to the concept of societal suffering, as the more cynical of these new companions literally shows her (from a distance) extreme poverty as it is playing out below the decadence of the upper decks. Bella cries and promptly sends Wedderburn’s gambling winnings to the dying babies via a couple of sly cruise staff who steal it and ensure Bella and Wedderburn’s removal from the ship. Next is Bella’s dalliance with prostitution to enjoy her favourite thing and sustain herself financially – sex?! and have money to survive?! Oh joy, who knew life could be so easy. Extra-curricular activities are ‘socialism’, a satisfying lesbian partner, and the last straw in Wedderburn’s dedication to the woman he has become infatuated with. She spits ever more poshly and verbosely in his face, and he ends up in a padded cell.

Meanwhile back home, dear old God is missing his wantaway daughter but attempts to scientifically assuage his pain by making a new one. She is much more lacking however, and God’s cancer that Max offers to cut out is too far gone – a genuinely tragic acknowledgement that is as poignant as it is matter of fact from this emphatic man of science. Word is sent to Bella and the homecoming to ‘Father’ and betrothed would seem to wrap things up, but … up turns husband of the woman Bella was before she was reanimated, a sociopathic military general who enjoyed a life with his wife as well as random cruelty wherever he could direct it, mostly at the end of a pistol to servants etc. Interestingly, Bella decides to leave Max at the altar and give life with Alfie Blessington a go, where she learns of a miserable existence which likely provoked her vessel’s desire to end itself, along with the child she carried. Strangely, she tells her ‘husband’ all about God’s experiment without pointing out that reigniting marital relations with him would result in a form of incest – she inhabits the body of Alfie’s wife but has grown through the brain of their child – you might have thought this would put an end to things instantly. Nevertheless, she succeeds in putting a bullet in Alfie’s foot and making good her escape with the assistance of Max, also instructing him to patch Alfie up and make him in to a new addition to her beloved God’s surgically spliced animal menagerie.

A sadly happy ending there is indeed, whereby Bella and Max embrace God and lovingly see him in to death, and Bella accepts Max as her husband through her own will. On top of this, Max supports her in becoming a surgeon as they exist happily in the curious domain built by God.

The production is visceral and pretty, and the soundtrack of very special note. Performances all round are wonderful, including sound confirmation of the underrated Willem Dafoe as an immensely versatile actor dedicated entirely and admirably to the beauty of film acting.

One complaint is the invasion of political nervousness when it comes to race and the characterisation of Bella – I couldn’t help but notice her lack of reaction to what would seem to be her first encounter with a person of non-white skin colour. Sadly, it would appear that the peculiarities of gender, sexuality and age are fair game to explore in today’s world, but even the naïve ponderings of a child-like individual cannot be tolerated when it comes to a first meeting with someone of a different ethnicity. I wondered at what someone like Terry Gilliam would have done with the same material, a fellow surrealist but one never governed so heavily by the demands of today’s sensitivities. A shame to compromise the exploration of Bella’s impetuous innocence by shying away from possible responses to racial difference – beware the comments of your children, they will be implanting ‘right-think’ directly in to their brains next! Direct God-like meddling with the brain rather than the natural exploration that is (mostly) allowed in Poor Things.