MATERIALISTS*

Writer-director Celine Song's follow-up to her wildly, and rightly, praised debut feature PAST LIVES is a dud.  I just don't get it. It wasn't funny, it wasn't romantic, it didn't have a lot of dramatic tension, and it tried to balance wry commentary on modern dating with a very serious assault storyline that jarred tonally and was handled too lightly and peripherally for my liking. I don't think you get to use a plot device like that to further your protagonist's emotional arc.

Dakota Johnson stars as a modern day matchmaker dealing with New Yorkers' unrealistic expectations.  She values her clients according to material aspects - age, wealth, height - and given her childhood marred by parental fights over money - seeks a rich husband herself.  At a client's wedding she seemingly gets everything she wants in "unicorn" rich handsome Pedro Pascal.  But she also runs into her old boyfriend, a poor and shambolic wannabe actor played by Chris Evans. There is zero dramatic tension as to who the matchmaker will end up with.  This story is one of her journey to accepting actual real love as opposed to material comfort.  Even worse, there is none of that intimate, deeply felt, perceptive storytelling that we got in PAST LIVES.  There's only one scene that even approximates it, when Johnson and Evans' characters are observing a wedding from a distance, just as the couple created imaginary stories for diners at the start of PAST LIVES. What a tremendous let down.

MATERIALISTS is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes. It was released in the USA in June and will be released in the UK on August 15th.

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.

LOVERS ROCK - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 12

LOVERS ROCK is another of the five-part series of films that Steve McQueen (TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE) has made to be shown on the BBC as part of its Small Axe series of films exploring British Black history.  It couldn't be more different from the courtroom drama, MANGROVE, that opened the festival.  Rather, this is a celebration of a certain time and a certain style of home-made West Indian entertainment - the house party! As the movie opens in early 80s Notting Hill, some young boys are clearing out the furniture from a house, and some women are cooking up a storm while singing together.  Hours later young West Indian men and women don their finery and pay their fifty pence to come into an absolutely banging house party, with the most amazing music. The atmosphere is hot and sultry with dancing in the queue for the loo and people eating home-made food and making out in the back garden.  As with all parties, there are unwelcome attentions from men, but also more happy couplings, and evidently a copious amount of weed being smoked.  The best way to approach this film - with little plot or dialogue - is just to be carried along on the positive vibe. To become so absorbed, as the revellers do, that when the song Silly Games stops, you feel the music continue, with perhaps the most tuneful dancers of all time singing a cappella. The sun comes up and so does reality.  This safe and warm private space that celebrates West Indian culture is exposed for what it is.  An attempted sexual assault is thwarted.  And as a new couple leaves to make out in the workplace of the boy, his boss finds them and scolds them.  The black man puts on his cockney geezer accent that makes him less Other and threatening to the White man. The compromises of living as an ethnic minority begin again. 

LOVERS ROCK has a running time of 68 minutes. It is the second episode in Steve McQueen's Small Axe TV series.  It will air on UK TV on November 22nd and be released on the internet in the USA on November 27th.