In the spirit of the season, here is my holiday gift to the "nuke Hollywood from orbit" folks. As always, I wish to remind those who think that no good movies are being made today -- or that none have been made since 2000, or 1975, or [pick a date] -- that (1) yes, there are some good current films but (2) you will not know that unless you actually take the time to step out of your rut and watch a few. Here is one. By "good movie," I do NOT mean that I think this is necessarily your cup of tea. It will appeal to some, but as a group, freepers are strong on science fiction, war movies and westerns. Past Lives is not any of these. There are smaller pockets of support for other genres. Indie character dramas are a minority taste on FR. Put that aside, check your genre preferences/prejudices at the door, and strap on your culture war helmet.
For purposes of the movie ping list, "good" movies are conservative. Nothing woke. No leftist propaganda films. Set in a coherent moral universe. Recognizable characters and motivations, not freakshow weirdness to drive moronically fantastical plotlines. I'm willing to allow for plenty of scoundrels and villainy as long as a movie has a coherent sense of right and wrong, so that evil is recognized as evil and is not glorified. The plot doesn't have to be developed as I might like, but the film needs to be honest about real costs, hard choices and dilemmas. Etc. etc., etc. You have probably read my standard rant on this before.
Past Lives premiered this past January at the Sundance Film Festival. It got terrific reviews and I put it on my watchlist, but I hadn't gotten around to watching it until now. It hits the mark for me on several levels. It is an immigrants' story -- and there is nothing more American than that. In my family, the immigrant on my dad's side was born in Westphalia in 1805; we are not sure exactly when he immigrated, but he was part of the great wave of German immigration that settled so much of the midwest. My mom's side of the family got here even earlier, with a young Scottish feller showing up as an indentured servant in tidewater Virginia in 1653. He and his kin drifted west with the frontier; I don't have an ancestor who shivered with George Washington at Valley Forge because mine were in the mountains fighting Indians, and they were north of the Ohio River and into the Old Northwest soon thereafter, so they wore blue during the Late Unpleasantness.
Plenty of immigrant stories have been written about my ancestral tribes. The Irish and then the Poles and Italians and Greeks and Jews all got the Hollywood treatment. Now the Asians, both the East Asian and South Asian tribes, are getting their innings -- and it turns out that they are making some pretty good movies as their populations are reaching critical mass and getting mainstreamed in U.S. cinema.
I regard immigrant stories as classic Hollywood, and there have been many good ones. My recent favorites include Brooklyn, which IMHO is still the best thing Saiorse Ronan has done: loneliness, homesickness, a foot in two worlds, a choice made at great cost. Columbus and After Yang, Kogonada's first two films, are also excellent; Kogonada was born in Seoul, came to the U.S. as a child when his parents immigrated, grew up in the midwest, and somehow got into filmmaking. As a first generation immigrant who was old enough to remember the old country, he is very conscious of having a foot in both worlds and facing the question of what to jettison and what to retain as he constructs a new identity. That of course is very much a first generation immigrant perspective; assuming he remains in the U.S., I expect that his grandchildren will be as American as you and I, and if they think about Korea at all, it will be because they have Bibimbap on their list of top five American dishes, along with pizza, Kung Pao chicken, Texas chili, and cheeseburgers with fries. With shrimp creole and fried catfish heading up the next five.
Anyhow, that bring us back to Past Lives, another Korean diaspora story. (Hey, if the Jews could do it, the Koreans can do it. This is the nature of American cinema.) This is the first film from writer/director Celine Song, whose family immigrated from South Korea to Ontario, Canada when she was 12. She went to college in Ontario and then came to the U.S. for an MFA in filmwriting at Columbia. She met an aspiring writer feller in the U.S. They married in 2016, when she would have been 28, and they live apparently in the U.S. (I'm not 100 percent sure.) The lead character in Past Lives is a Korean girl whose family immigrated to Canada when she was 12, who immigrated a second time to the U.S. to study writing, and who meets and marries an aspiring American writer feller. They live in New York ... and you will get the gist of the rest from the trailer. Autobiographical? Ya think? The question is how much.
My guess is that Nora's old flame from Korea in the movie -- remember, they were 12 when they parted; they had an age-appropriate crush on each other but nothing more -- is fictional and is there to represent all her bundled-up memories and feelings of everything she had left behind. An immigrant's story: the price of change, the haunted memories of the paths not taken, the echoes of past lives. This is NOT played as a matter of identity politics; it is presented as a question of homesickness, nostalgia, and consciousness of loss, with no antagonism whatsoever directed at anyone else.
Put aside whether you have a particular interest in immigrants' stories per se. What elevates this film is that the immigrant's story is merely the particularistic setting for a story that punches straight through to universal themes. Are there any among us who don't wonder about the paths not taken, or who don't have a golden memory of something gone beyond recall, or who perhaps don't still (in some sense) love the memory of a girl we once knew? If we have the sense that God gave us and haven't gotten addled in old age, we don't confuse such memories with present realities and try to live in a dream, but that doesn't mean the memories weren't real once and that we don't treasure them today. Really ... I mean, why else would I have a wall plaque hanging proudly on my wall today, said plaque being a section of the old basketball floor from IU's Assembly Hall on which Bob Knight's greatest teams played? 50 year old pine planking can't be more precious than that. Holy relics are holy relics, including memories.
Is Past Lives a conservative movie? You decide. There's a universal human theme at speaks to mystic chords of memory. There are no villains. Every character acts with great consideration and kindness towards every other character. No one acts out. The two lead characters -- who had parted at age 12 and have not seen each other in 24 years -- are both surprised and somewhat overwhelmed at the power of the memories they unlock, but they have both moved on, the young woman is married and committed to her new life and career, and both know that the past is past. The husband is not a bad guy; that might have led to a very different story. But he understands that his wife is being visited by a ghost from her past, and that her feelings are not just about a boy she once know but a whole world she had left behind. Nothing happens behind anyone's back, and the husband and wife communicate openly and honestly throughout. At no point is Nora on the cusp of cheating or even running away; as she even says explicitly at one point, she has made her choices, she has chosen a life, and she is not about to throw it away. There is no sex, no nudity, and no betrayal. To sum it up in a phrase, the characters live the little virtues. In my book, that makes Past Lives a conservative film.
I am on a mission to populate a top ten conservative film list for 2023. I was getting pretty pessimistic a couple of weeks ago, but the holidays provide some quiet time for watching a few movies while recovering from overdoses of hospitality at the dinner table. I'm not up to seven, maybe eight, good conservative movies of the year. They span multiple genres. I'm still a couple short, so if you've seen a good one, sound off.
And if you are one of the freepers who likes Korean films, check this one out. The writer/director is a Korean immigrant, most of the actors are Korean, a lot of the dialogue is in Korean, and -- I'm going out on a limb here -- the cultural grounding of the movie is deeply rooted in Korean themes. Woke Hollywood it ain't. The film industry is quite internationalized and A24 is the production and distribution company; that too will catch some freepers' attention.
I have to head out and eat my way through another holiday obligation. Have at it. I will be back if and when I survive. Enjoy, and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Movie ping list.
“people are destined to meet one another if their souls have overlapped a certain number of times before”
So THAT’S how all those insurance salesmen are finding me!
This is a better review than the linked essay. One of the virtues of social media is being able to hear from people far too intelligent and capable to settle for jobs in journalism. This is a fine example of the gold that occasionally peeks out from the dross of the random drive-bys.
Thanks for the review. I am always on the lookout for something decent to watch.
I watched Past Lives a few weeks ago. Exactly the type of film I seek out but seldom find. Very moving but not the type of story that would appeal to many of the people I know.
Sounds like an interesting film.
Thanks
Sounds like an interesting film.
Thanks
Have you ever watched PRIMER?
TRULY enjoyed.
Watch with friends. Two or 3 times.
Sounds like an enjoyable movie - as usual - thanks for sharing with us.
I had not; and the entire paragraph is excellent!
I am eagerly awaiting a chance to see this movie based on this beautifully written review and your insightful comments!
For "something more" in the way of a love that might have been, you might like The Dead, based on a short story by James Joyce, directed by John Houston and starring Angelica Houston (1987). It is a stunning examination of suppressed feelings in the modest, "lace curtain" middle class of a normally quite repressed Irish society of a century ago. There is a wonderful cameo in it by Donal Donnelly as the poignantly inebreated relative—he did an equally stunning small part as Archbishop Gilday of the Vatican Bank in Godfather III.
... so ... not about the theme to Titanic?