Past Lives is the feature debut from Celine Song and arrives garlanded with awards and festooned with dew and misty-eyed reviews.
A 12 year old boy and a girl are separated when the girl’s family emigrate from Korea to north America. 12 years later they rediscover one another on a thing called the Internet, and 12 years after that they finally meet, when he pays her a visit in New York where she now lives with her writer husband.
What a joy it is to see a female film maker finally being given the opportunity to make something that’s every bit as formulaic and as doggedly sentimental as anything produced by one of her male counterparts.
Past Lives is every bit as dull and conventional as any of the recent offerings from Steven Spielberg or Ron Howard. Or, for that matter, as Oppenheimer was, a film that did such a sterling job of looking exactly like something that either of the former pair could have made.
In fairness, and in stark contrast to The Fablemans, Oppenheimer or practically any other film we’re subjected to these days at the cinema, at least Past Lives has the good grace to come in at under the 2 hour mark. But lordy, they’re some of the slowest minutes you’ll ever have to sit through
Predictably then it’s being loudly heralded from all around the Hollywood hills. And none of us will be surprised when Song gets rewarded by the bean-counters with one of the vehicles propelling one of the cereal-packet, action-figure, meal-deal superhero franchises that keep drawing pre-teens to multiplexes to feast on buckets of salt and gallons of sugar.
Past Lives is absolutely fine. It’s perfectly inoffensive, technically competent and professionally produced. Her agent must be thrilled.
You can see the trailer to Past Lives here:
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