past lives

You Can’t Wake Up if You Don’t Fall Asleep

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

I am no longer a true believer in the oft-repeated Ebert quote, “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Or, I at least no longer believe that empathy is the most interesting or noble thing the movies machine can generate.  The more I’ve succumbed to incurable cinephilia in recent years the less interested I’ve become in the movies’ ability to document or reflect objective reality back at the audience, as if we don’t get more than enough real-life tedium outside the theater walls.  Even if there’s value to learning and vicariously experiencing the intimate details of each other’s lives through cinema, reducing the artform to its ability to generate empathy feels small & unimaginative, especially if that’s the only thing on a movie’s mind.  Subtlety, restraint, and adherence to real-world logic are boring, self-imposed restrictions for a medium that’s so apt for dreams & poetry.  It’s just as much of a well-worn cliché, but I’ve come to the point where cinema’s function as a machine that generates shared, communal dreams is its primary cultural value to me.  Empathy is a useful byproduct of the movie dream machine, but it’s at best secondary to the way cinema can deeply submerge us in the subconscious id of the artists behind it.  If a filmmaker is using the art of the moving image to achieve anything other than full sensory intoxication or communal mesmerism, they might as well write prose or record a podcast instead.  There’s so much more to the medium than farming empathy in the documentation or dramatic retelling of each other’s daily drudgery.

At least, that’s what I was thinking about while watching a double feature of this summer’s most critically lauded works: Wes Anderson’s ensemble cast sci-fi comedy Asteroid City and Celine Song’s long-distance relationship breakdown Past Lives.  I likely shouldn’t have bothered seeing Past Lives at all, since subtle, tastefully underplayed dramas aren’t really my thing.  I do allow myself to get talked into seeing a few gloomy exercises in real-world restraint every year, though, if not just to see what everyone else is gushing about while I’m seeking out high-style histrionics & novelty.  I had about the same experience with Past Lives as I had with last year’s similarly lauded & restrained Aftersun: respect for its craft but bafflement over its ecstatic praise, since practically every film festival is overflowing with similarly subtle, underplayed titles just like it (most of which never land proper distribution).  In contrast, I watched Asteroid City for the second time in 24 hours on that double bill and found its dreamlike artifice much more emotionally rewarding than Past Lives‘s real-world resignation.  In The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson self-assessed how his fussy live-action New Yorker cartoons function as populist entertainment; in Asteroid City, the self-assessment peers inward, shifting to their function as emotional Trojan horses. I found the former funnier but the latter more affecting, sinking several layers of framing-devices deeper into his subconscious to pick at the same somber tones of yearning & heartbreak as Past Lives with less of a literal, straight-forward approach.  It likely says less about the merits of the movies than it says about my facilities as an audience that I needed to puzzle at the complex narrative structure & fussy visual craft of Asteroid City (a movie within a stage play within a television special) to enjoy its small, intimate character moments for their own pleasure, while Past Lives was willing to serve those pleasures to me directly. Apparently, to fully appreciate the small things I need them buried under a crushing excess of style & artifice; I need to feel like they came to me in a dream.

The pattern repeated with my library DVD haul that same week, which happened to include two coming-of-age stories about young women: the 70s-set Judy Blume adaptation Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and the French dirt-bike crime thriller Rodeo.  One was a critically-lauded empathy machine that documents and validates the awkwardness & inner turmoil of puberty in all young American girls who are impatient to become young American women.  The other alternates between the quiet restraint of a crime world docudrama and the sensory free-for-all of a legitimate art piece, submerging the audience in the dreams & volatile emotions of one particular teenage reprobate with an ecstatic passion for racing stolen dirt bikes.  You can likely guess which one I preferred.  Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is less extraordinary than it is warmly familiar.  It reminded me of a lot of classic comfort watches that I grew up with in the 1990s: Mermaids, My Girl, Now & Then, etc.  It’s a pleasant movie about pleasant people, one that directly asks you to empathize with common, everyday rites of passage.  Rodeo is a much thornier picture.  It documents the experiences of real-world dirt bike stunt racers by casting them as their own fictional avatars and—in the case of its disgruntled antiheroine—inviting you into their prophetic nightmares of self-destruction & immolation.  There’s no reason to contrast & compare the two movies other than that my public library requests for them happened to be fulfilled on the same day; they’re as structurally & aesthetically distinct from each other as the vintage postcard artifice of Asteroid City and the real-world melancholy of Past Lives.  The same questions of which film was making better, more purposeful use of their shared medium were rattling around in my empty skull, though, and I again came down in favor of the dream machine over the empathy machine.

I’ve been writing reviews for this humble movie blog for eight years now, which is a long enough duration that I can’t help but reflect on what I value in this artform I’ve spent so much time admiring & picking apart.  Wes Anderson’s spent at least three decades admiring & picking apart the artform himself, and Asteroid City appears to find him arriving at similar conclusions.  Throughout the film, performers within his multi-layered narrative break character to question the meaning behind their dialogue & actions as written, as well as their place within specific framing devices at specific times.  The Anderson avatar who wrote the piece they’re performing has no clear answers for the reasoning behind his words, only that they work to express subconscious emotion.  In a climactic scene that lovingly parodies The Twilight Zone, the performers stare at the camera directly and chant “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” in a rhythmic, zombified monotone, reinforcing that to experience & share in that subconscious emotion the audience must give into the artifice of the work and forget the reasoning behind it.  We have to dream.  As thoughtful & empathetic as they are, neither Past Lives nor Are You There God? ever fully fall asleep; they are awake to the logical restrictions of the real world.  Rodeo drifts along in that in-between state you feel just before you fall asleep, purposefully confusing a documentation of reality with the shared-dream intoxication of cinema, only fully letting go of the handlebars in its emotional climax.  Of this group, only Asteroid City fully falls asleep, and I found its emotional provocations the most effective among them because they were allowed to be as indirect and inexplicable as our own internal responses to the world outside our heads.  It would be foolish to expect every movie to interact with (or entirely ignore) reality in that way, but the ones that do so are the ones that are most fully engaging with the tools, methods, and uses of the artform.

-Brandon Ledet

Past Lives (2023)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

There’s a little piece of quotational wisdom that’s never far from my mind: “Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it.” That it comes from The Muppet Christmas Carol and is recited by Kermit the Frog does not make it less poignant, or less true. Sometimes, when those words resurface in my mind, I also recall illustrator Olivia de Recat’s simple line drawings of closeness lines over time, which depict how two individual lives intersect (or don’t) based on the way that relationships change over time. They’re minimalistic, with only two lines in each image, but they resonate: the gentle curves of “first love” speak volumes, the angular intersection of “one night stand” has a kind of vivacious energy that I love, and the “friends with benefits” lines, where one party starts to move away from the other and the second party tries to follow before separating in a way that can only be described as dejected, is my personal favorite. I recently acted it out (or had it enacted upon me), actually, and I walked away from that schism having taken some real psychic damage. Past Lives has come along at exactly the right moment to make sense of everything by envisioning meetings and partings in a way that breathes meaning and beauty into our sadnesses, our joys, and our presumed certainties. 

Twenty-four years ago, Na Young and Hae Sung were classmates, competitors, best friends, and potentially more. When we meet them, at age 12, Na Young is trying not to cry over the fact that Hae Sung has bested her academically, perhaps for the first time. Unfortunately, their halcyon days of walking home together from school and playing among public sculptuary are cut short by Na Young’s family’s immigration to Canada. Twelve years pass, and Na Young, now going by her Anglicized name of Nora Moon (Greta Lee), is a student playwright in NYC. While on the phone with her mother, she decides to look Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) up on Facebook and discovers that he has tried to reach out to her. The two reconnect and share the maximum level of emotional intimacy that two people on opposite sides of the planet communicating via a glitchy Skype connection can. Unable to meet in person for a prolonged period of time because of their individual studies, the two take a temporary break that lasts a lot longer than either intended. Nora meets Arthur (John Magaro) at a writing residency, and she tells him about the concept of in-yun, a concept relating to fate that paints the serendipitous connections of life as predestined. Twelve years later, Nora and Arthur are married and still in NYC, and Hae Sung comes to visit, supposedly on vacation, but really to reunite. The immediate and intense magnetism between the two is palpable, but their paths have been going in opposite directions for so long that their destinies may be forever parted. 

Early in the film, Na Young’s mother explains to Hae Sung’s that she and her husband have chosen to immigrate despite having good careers and social networks because, to paraphrase, when you let go of something, you also gain something. It’s a very simple idea in a sparse text, but it’s nonetheless true. Nora and Hae Sung both recognize this, but in different ways and at different points in their lives, and they realize the opposite as well, that hanging onto something means the death (at least in this life) of all the things that might have been. Nora meets Arthur when she lets Hae Sung go, and Hae Sung meets his unnamed girlfriend at about the same time. Hae Sung, at 24, is insistent that he hang onto the blueprint of his planned career by going to Shanghai to learn Mandarin instead of taking the option to learn English in NYC and be near Nora instead, and in so doing ensures that there is only one path this life will take — one without her, even if he doesn’t realize it at the time. In the film, as in life, there are a million little moments where the choices of holding fast or letting go have an effect that echoes throughout one’s lifetime (or lifetimes), and in every single one, I felt the intensity of each of those tiny, almost imperceptible forks in the road. When Nora and Hae Sung start talking to each other again at 24, there’s a sense of such  in every wording choice that feels immense in the way that every exchange of words with a crush or someone you feel an intense connection to but aren’t intimately familiar with always feels … portentous. That blending of the feeling of getting to know one another (again, or for the first time) and that sense of something so much bigger taking form on the horizon, it’s effervescent and light and yet so big, so bold, so beautiful. 

Past Lives is truly a perfect title. Each time that the two meet, so much about themselves has changed, to the point that they don’t perceive themselves as the same people. This is textual; at one point, Nora draws a distinction between her adult self and the child Na Young that Hae Sung used to know. Hae Sung, however, still sees Na Young inside of Nora, and she does the same for him; they may not be literally reincarnated, but they are different people with something innate and unchanging inside that they recognize in one another. This cycle is reinforced in the way that Nora and Hae Sung see each other only every twelve years, like clockwork. Even the location choices reiterate the cyclical nature of the two’s relationship: on the day that they reunite in their thirties, the two are framed against Jane’s Carousel, and they later also take the ferry tour around the Statue of Liberty. Both are rides that ultimately end in the same place that they begin and then cycle again, in a lovely metaphor. 

Nora is a fascinating character, and Greta Lee is an astonishing performer. This is a sparse movie, with very little non-diegetic sound and music sprinkled in only very occasionally, and that aesthetic plays out on screen as well, with a lot of the performance of Nora coming down to the smallest of facial movements on both Lee and Teo’s parts, the tiniest wrinkling of doubt, the smallest twinge of hope at the edge of the lip, the almost imperceptible brow tightening of longing deferred. It’s pure magic, and it wouldn’t work if we didn’t spend so much time with these two people, learning them. In a different world, there’s a version of this narrative where we love Nora a little less, find her dismissal of Hae Sung in 2012 cold and heartless, or find her honesty with her husband and her reassurances to him hollow and false, but Lee imbues Nora with an almost impossible level of likability. We see ourselves in her. She papers over the things that she can’t control by making blanket statements of agency that are questionably true: when her parents choose to immigrate to Canada, she tells her friends that she wants to go, supposedly so that she can one day win the Nobel Prize (at age 24, this dream has changed to winning the Pulitzer, and at 36, when prompted by Hae Sung, she jokes that she’s now aiming for a Tony). When realizing that she and Hae Sung will not see each other for at least a year when they reconnect in 2012, she tells him that she needs a break to focus on her life in New York, but we know that this isn’t completely true because she begins dating Arthur very shortly thereafter. Lee deftly navigates all of this, and I can’t wait to see more of her.  

I’m hesitant to make a comparison between this film and one with a white person at the directorial helm and starring an entirely white European cast, but I feel I must; when I walked out of the theater, I felt much the same as I did when I left my screening of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It wasn’t just the sparsity of intrusions from more filmic elements, or that both filmmakers were named Celine, but in the way that both works are about loves which are so vast that they fill up every space that presents itself and thus feel certain and immovable, but which are ultimately all-too-fragile. There’s a scene in Past Lives in which Nora walks through the empty house that will be her home for the duration of her writing residency and we get to hear every footstep as she crosses the space, just as every footfall in Portrait was likewise audible and meaningful; later, there’s a loud metallic thump when Nora walks over a metal grate on the sidewalk. It’s human, it’s real, it’s tangible. That doesn’t always mean that some alchemical process of “art” is happening, but in a movie so intimate and so suffused with longing as Past Lives, the magic is there. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond