PAST LIVES*****

The charm of the road not taken is that one can reminisce and reimagine safely from the comfort of that choice now being closed off.  Celine Song's debut feature PAST LIVES asks what would happen if the road not taken was never quite in the rear-view mirror but persisted as an option in the present day, tugging at one's sleeve and distracting us from the seemingly happy life now lived. What if our choices were still open to be re-litigated?

Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) are childhood sweethearts in Korea.  They are on the verge of a sweet pre-pubescent romance and even have a charming date in a park chaperoned by her mum when Nora's family emigrate to Canada.  

Twelve years later, Nora and Hae Sung rediscover each other via social media and create a Skype romance that moves rapidly from whimsical to serious and then frightening.  Frightening because an actual romance will require compromise: Hae Song has to do his military service and is committed to studying engineering in Korea; Nora has been accepted to a writer's retreat in Montauk. Both put their careers before their relationship.  

We jump forward another twelve years and Nora is seemingly happily married to fellow writer Arthur (John Magaro). They seem happy despite the cultural barriers between them. He tries to learn Korean to narrow the gap - to go with her into her instinctive dream language. But at the same time, as she explains to him, she doesn't feel Korean, especially when she contrasts herself to Hae Sung. He is "so Korean". She is Korean American. 

Hae Sung finally travels to New York and the weight of two decades of emotion become apparent. How does one weigh up the the pull of childhood love and cultural resonance against the reality of change, maturity and cultural difference? Is Hae Song drawn to - does he even know and understand - Nora now? Is she attracted to Hae Song or to a nostalgia for Seoul?

Song's film is delicate, quiet, elegant and wistful. It speaks to the impossibility of going back and recapturing a different time and place - a certain innocence.  But it is not melancholy. It celebrates the fact that people grow and move forward and that while this might make a rekindled romance impossible and undesirable, it acknowledges the need for.... well....acknowledgement. You can both love your husband and acknowledge your real feelings for a childhood sweetheart, and the potency of a fantasy of the road not taken.

The three leads are all strong in this film. But for me the standouts are Song's taut, spare script and cinematographer Shabier Kirchner's washed-out palette and framing. Often we see characters set apart from each other in the same frame, or filmed from a distance while their voices utter dialogue unrelated to that moment. We are at a distance, withheld from their true feelings, and this perfectly captures the ambiguity about what those feelings truly are.  At the end of the film, we know far more than the unseen couple speculating on the triumvirate's relationships at a bar at the start of the film, but we don't really know them fully.  And that is as it should be.

PAST LIVES is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 105 minutes.  It played Berlin and Sundance 2023 and was released in the USA in June. It will be released in the UK on September 8th.

JOY RIDE***

Adele Lim - screenwriter on CRAZY RICH ASIANS and  RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON - returns to our screens with a raunchy comedy that reads like an Asian remake of BRIDESMAIDS. Four Asian-Americans go on a holiday to China, have a bunch of sex, take a bunch of drugs, and wrestle with their identities. The comedy is crude, the plotting very much tab A into slot B, complete with third act falling out and fourth act resolution. There is nothing surprising here but it was quite funny, if in a deeply, deeply crude way.

The central protagonist is Emily in Paris' Ashley Park playing model minority adopted daughter Audrey. She is sent on a business trip to China to land a new client largely because of her ethnicity. The joke is that she is culturally white, has never dated an Asian, and evinces no interest in finding her Chinese birth mother.  That's where her culturally-assertive, aspiring-artist best-friend Lolo (Sherry Cola) comes in. The third wheel on the holiday is Sabrina Wu's Deadeye - a genderqueer "weird" friend who comes closer than any other character to showing emotional vulnerability as a loner who finds community in K-Pop. And when they get to China they hook up with Ashley's college roommate Kat, played by EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE's Stephanie Hsu. She's now a Chinese soap-star, hiding her sex-positive past from her hunky Christian boyfriend.

There's lots of good stuff in this film about the pressures of being a model minority, and the experience of being both not quite American and yet also not quite Chinese - at home in neither and longing for acceptance in both.  We also get a really nuanced take on racism.  Sure, Audrey's boss sent her to China because of her race, which is racist, but then again, what's up with Audrey not dating Asians, and the girls feeling safer in a train carriage with an American woman?

I just felt the social commentary was undercut by the deeply predictable plotting and crude humour. Your mileage on that may vary.

JOYRIDE has a running time of 95 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK. JOY RIDE played SXSW 2023 and was released in the USA last month. It was released in the UK this week. 

This is not a review of DECISION TO LEAVE - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 10

If DECISION TO LEAVE were made by anyone other than Park Chan Wook would it have been programmed in the BFI London Film Festival?  Because let's be clear, name recognition of a former icon aside, there was precious little in the first hour of this film to indicate we were watching a film of note.

As the movie opens we discover than old Korean functionary has had a deadly accident while mountaineering.  His young Chinese widow (Tang Wei - LUST, CAUTION) is under surveillance by Korean cop (Park Hei-Il). She doesn't seem to grieve and isn't surprised by his death as he was apparently being blackmailed.  She also murdered her own mum and is on the run from the Chinese authorities.  She claims it was a mercy killing.

For the first hour of the film that's all we get. Her being opaque and him becoming obsessed with her. But zero sexual chemistry or suspense. The only actual entertainment is from the cop's comedy sidekick who suspects the widow for xenophobic reasons and literally does drunken pratfalls. 

Maybe it turned into a masterpiece of VERTIGO like plotting and LUST/CAUTION style sexual chemistry in its final hour. I didn't stick around to find out. And reading reviews I feel like this film is the Emperor's New Clothes. No matter how good the final hour was or wasn't there's no excuse for the indulgence of the first. 

DECISION TO LEAVE has a running time of 138 minutes.  The film played Cannes 2022 where Park Chan Wook won Best Director. It also played Toronto. It was released in the USA this week and will be released in the UK the following week.

BAMSEOM PIRATES SEOUL INFERNO - BFI London Film Festival 2017 Preview

BAMSEOM PIRATES SEOUL INFERNO is amazingly mischievous fun for about the first hour of its running time. Two kids form a shitty punk band in the great tradition of The Sex Pistols. They're self-consciously bad at playing their instruments, but have a lot of attitude.  In a vague, kind of post-modern way, they're too cool to actually have an ideology. They're post-ideology. They're against tuition fees and privatisation and authoritarianism and boring middle-class stuff like learning to play an instrument.  When people claim they can't understand their lyrics, they do a gig with a powerpoint presentation, but then claim they deliberately made the lyrics un-understandable. They come across as very smart, very funny and creating their own mythos on the fly.  The one thing they're not, is, truly subversive. In the same way that The Sex Pistols ruffled a lot of insecure people in the UK, Bamseom Pirates are deliberately provocative but neither are enemies of the state.  The Pistols said they were the antichrist, but they weren't satanists. So when Bamseom Pirates mention North Korea, or Kim Jong Il, that doesn't make them North Korean spies. This seems so obvious you wonder why I'm saying it until you realise that the Pirates' manager was prosecuted under South Korea's National Security Law for, effectively, treason, for retweeting a North Korean tweet. And when he went to trial, the band and their lyrics effectively went on trial too.  

This latter half of the movie was absolutely fantastic in its philosophical and emotional impact.  I was forced to reassess my dismissive views of the band as CLEARLY as funny and OBVIOUSLY not spies. After all, if I lived in Seoul, tens of miles from the North Korea border, in range of missiles, would I be so confident and tolerant of dissent and satire? Would I perhaps become as intolerant and impatient as the serious young men on the debate programme on TV questioning why we should tolerate such childish behaviour?  Emotionally, watching this lighthearted prankster turned into a shy, submissive, apologetic wreck by a disproportionately serious and angry trial was heartbreaking.  The manager keeps speaking of being confused. He hates authoritarianism and was always so proud to be satirical in the South, knowing this behaviour would not be tolerated in North Korea. So when he's prosecuted under the easily abused National Security Law, it's as if the border doesn't exist. I could've cried for him and his crushed spirit.  In that, BAMSEOM PIRATES SEOUL INFERNO became an exceptionally good doc - because it not only shone a light on an issue I didn't know existed, but it provoked me and moved me too.

BAMSEOM PIRATES SEOUL INFERNO has a running time of 120 minutes. There are tickets available for both screenings at the BFI London Film Festival. 

ASSASSINATION - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day 4

Choi Dong-Hoon's ASSASSINATION is an epic historical action drama set in 1930s Korea and featuring everything from action to romance to comedy to politics.  It combines beautifully researched and recreated sets and costumes and a fine sense of the grey areas of history with a certain heightened panache reminiscent of Tarantino. This is history turned up to eleven, and I loved it.

As the movie opens we are in 1910s Seoul under Japanese colonial rule.  A greedy capitalist bastard is sucking up the Governor-General and decides to have his wife assassinated rather than have her resistance activities compromise his rise to wealth and power.  Twenty years later and the Korean resistance leader commissions Captain Yim to gather together the A-Team, sorry, three Korean assassins to return to Seoul and kill  that treacherous businessman and his ally, an evil Japanese military commander.  They will have the perfect opportunity when the two men get together on the eve of their children's marriage of convenience. But this isn't the only assassination commissioned in the opening hour of this film.  Because treacherous Captain Yim has also commissioned the infamous "Hawaiian Pistol" to assassinate the A-team, and Captain Yim's boss has in turn commissioned two young men to kill Yim if it turns out he is a spy.