KWIF=Kent's Week in Film
This week:
Past Lives (2023, d. Celine Song - AmazonPrime)
Nimona (2023, d. Troy Quane, Nick Bruno - Netflix)
Plus One (2019, d. Andrew Rhymer, Jeff Chan - Netflix)
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Celine Song's Past Lives is kind of a bittersweet tonic to such sequences of relationship animosity. It's an ode to individualism as well as to love. It's an incredibly mature, thoughtful look at relationships and shows people who are capable of self-awareness and managing their emotions.
Na Young and Hae Sung grew up together in Seoul. By the time they were twelve they were intensely competitive with one another in school, but also incredibly attached. Just as they're starting to explore feelings for each other, Na Young is ripped away as her family emigrates to Canada. No word of a lie, but their last moment with each other is one of the most beautifully composed visual metaphors in cinema, thanks to a perfectly scouted location.
Twelve years later, Na Young, now Nora (Greta Lee), is an aspiring playwright, while Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) has wrapped up mandatory military service and looks to the next phase of his life. But he's not forgotten a piece of his past, and he reaches out through a series of connections on Facebook to find Nora, who, curious herself, reaches out in return. Their connection is as immediate as if they had never left it, only the attraction is much more adult and the emotions much more understood. Alas, a half a world away, and half a day's difference makes a relationship hard to sustain... and what's more, Nora is finding it distracting from her goals, from what she wants to achieve. With no hope of Hae Sung coming to New York and no time for her to make a trip to Soeul, she presses "pause" on whatever is happening between them. And they both go about their lives.
I think one of the more difficult things in film and television storytelling is making video calling interesting to watch, but Song here really gets so much out of how her actors behave towards the camera (and just off camera). There's so much to be said about what we see on the screen within a screen, but then there's what we see in the scene that the characters don't see of each other...physicality, gestures... and then there's the missed connections, which, somehow, are just heartbreaking.
Another 12 years pass. Nora is married to another writer, Arthur (John Magaro), and they have, what I think can be said is a very practical partnership. When Hae Sung, recently reconnecting with Nora, comes to New York to visit, there is clearly a rekindling happening between them, a palpable attraction that hasn't gone away in the 24 years since they were last able to touch each other. What results is a Before Sunrise-esque level of engagement, talking candidly about what life has been like, and what life could have been like in different circumstances. Arthur is not ignorant of the connection they share, he's not oblivious to the cliches of storytelling where he's the odd-man-out, but at the same time, there's a reality that all three players are fully aware up. No one is upending their lives just for some idea of "love".
The way the characters engage with each other, with openness and honesty that is both given and received, is absolutely refreshing. There's no real drama in Past Lives, there's no romantic cliches of "true love conquers all", there's just a heavy concrete slab of reality at the foundation of this movie, and in Nora's character. She is a realist, and despite whatever emotions come with Hae Sung, she has so many more emotions tied elsewhere that would be uprooted to be with him.
Despite the almost wet blanket scenario and absence of high drama, it's a very romantic movie. It is a movie about love, and it's never a bad time to be in the presence of love.
But it's also a movie about what it means to feel complete, and love is only a piece of it. Why do people cheat on their partners or leave their family behind to run off with a new fling? It's often got nothing to do with the other person and everything to do with themselves...they're chasing external happiness.
Hae Sung, for his part, can't let go of Nora because he's not found happiness with himself. He's still chasing a feeling he felt long ago in someone else, rather than trying to find that feeling inside.
--This is the last film of the Best Picture Oscar Nominees that I had yet to see, and this is the first time in a long time, perhaps ever, I've seen all Nominees prior to the ceremony. Last week I ranked the nominees in my preferential order (not who I think will win, just my preference), and I think Past Lives would fall into that middle pack with The Holdovers, Oppenheimer, and American Fiction, where any of these four films could swap places in the 3-6 slot. But I still like Anatomy of a Fall and Poor Things well above them all.--
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The film starts with a bit of an overcomplicated history lesson voiceover describing how the mystical land and society was built around protecting itself from monster then jumps a thousand years in the future to find a techno-medi-evil terrain where a young street kid was taken in by the queen to be educated as part of the land's fabled knighthood, a position usually reserved for the elite families of the city.
Ballister Boldheart is about to be knighted, bucking tradition, but during the ceremony he is framed for murdering the queen and goes on the run. He is found by Nimona, an energetic changeling who looks only for companionship from a fellow outcast. The pair have to battle both class structures and intolerance to uncover the truth of the Queen's death, as well as, perhaps, change some minds about changelings being the monsters this society has been so afraid of for generations.
Without really any fanfare, Nimona is a young adult fantasy-adventure that features queer characters as its leads. Ballister was in a romantic relationship with Ambrosius Goldenloin, the champion knight, until Ambrosius cut his arm off when he thought Ballister murdered the Queen. Nimona is trans-coded, and while the character is pronouned "she" throughout, Nimona kind of bucks the idea of even being gendered, or classified as any sort of form.
I love that aspect of the film, that it so effortlessly includes these characters without ever awkwardly making a point about it, but at the same time, it's the entire subtext of the movie if you're looking for it. Unfortunately the setting of the film did absolutely nothing for me. The societal structure, the visual design, the meta-cross of fantasy and techno-future...I just didn't find it appealing.
But the final act turned into a real emotional rollercoaster and really got me in the gut and got the tears flowing. The climax raises the stakes to a very surprising and intense level, and its resolution is a thing of absolute beauty. I may not have been enthralled by the first two acts leading up to it, but it pays off really nicely. Riz Ahmed as Ballister and Chloe Grace Moretz both deliver really great voice performances as well. It's not a better film than Across the Spider-Verse in this year's Best Animate Picture Oscar race, not The Boy and the Heron, but it shouldn't be dismissed as so many Netflix originals often do.
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I had seen Erskine around over the years, including the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series, but she wasn't that prominently featured (I haven't yet watched her comedy series Pen15). So Mr. & Mrs. Smith is my first big exposure, and wow...what an impact. I'll get to that review later this coming week. But with the Letterboxd recommendation of more wonderful Erskine business, Plus One became a must-watch.
Erskine plays Alice, who gets into an arrangement with her buddy, Ben (Quaid) to be each other's dates to the many weddings each has to attend that summer. They're just friends to start, she even acts as his wingman for a time, and there's not an ounce of romantic chemistry between them at first, but the friend chemistry is wholly palpable. But you can't spend that amount of time with one another in fancy dress, loaded with alcohol, surrounding by sweeping sentiments of love, and not, perhaps, get swept up in it.
But how do they know it's real? I came to the movie for Erskine, but Quaid is a very likeable presence and the ostensible lead of the film (it really does focus more on Ben's life and POV than Alice's). Where Alice has recently gone through a break-up at the start of the film, Ben seems kind of terminally alone. He's the last of his friends who is single by the time the summer wedding season gets into full swing, and when he looks at his twice-divorced father (Ed Begley Jr.) who just proposed to a woman half his age, Ben thinks he understands why. So when he gets together with Alice, and, more surprisingly Alice is all-in on the relationship, it's Ben who starts to get shaken by what they have.
In a way, Plus One follows a pretty similar formula to beloved Kent household favourite Holidate, so there was something comfortable about the structure, though the timeframe of the relationship is sort of compressed over a few summer months as opposed to a whole year. Still, changing venues, different people surrounding the characters, and the device of leading each wedding "chapter" off with the best man or bridesmaid speech (and highlighting all the different tropes of said speeches) was terrific.
Erskine is the standout here. She's a bundle of aggressive energy, with a sincerity and vulnerability that temper the aggressiveness into charming. As she'd proven in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, she's a versatile and gifted actress, comedic or otherwise, and I expect we'll be seeing an increasing amount of her over the next couple of year. Quaid has more of his mom Meg Ryan's charm than his dad's sort of smarm, which makes him kind of perfect for a romcom lead. He's not the stereotype of the romcom lead, but he is a guy you definitely root for to get his shit together. It's charming.
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