Haha!!! These four have made the most beautiful love film of the year

One day, Celine Song, 35, was sitting in a New York bar between her two husbands. So between her American husband and the Korean, she wanted to get married when she was twelve. Stupidly enough, Celine’s parents had prevented the marriage with the high school sweetheart at an early stage: they emigrated with their children from South Korea to Canada. And Celine Song, the daughter of a filmmaker who always loved to write plays, became an adult playwright in New York.

Until that night, when she was in the bar with her two husbands. She knew then that she had to turn her story into a movie, not a play. That this material was too big for a play. Suddenly everything that held her life together and made her life special came crashing down on the young woman: her childhood in Seoul, growing up as a migrant, her existence in New York, her marriage, but also her old little love and the question what would have become of her if she had never emigrated.

Because there was a feeling that the man from Korea was an anchor that connected her to her old Asian life. That he had a purpose in her life and gave it meaning. That she and he were a great love story, even though they never kissed.

And then there was the issue of translation: Celine’s two men couldn’t understand each other, the Korean could barely speak English, the American could barely speak Korean, but they sat there wanting to get to know each other, even if it was both hurt. For the sake of Celine Song. And she went on to write and direct the movie Past Lives.

And now? While the film is being hailed as the surprise of the year, it is already being hyped as a career changer and possible winner at the Oscars, being called “jewel” and “masterpiece”. It is said that he will be the new “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (7 Oscars) or the new “Parasite” (4 Oscars).

Just like «Everything…», «Past Lives» was also produced by A24, the young production company for the innovative independent film. Her successes include ‘Hereditary’, ‘Midsommar’, ‘Moonlight’, ‘Lady Bird’ and ‘Ex Machina’. A24 has flair and guts for unusual material, for extremely crazy ones like «Everywhere…», but also for very fine ones like «Past Lives».

The story that Song tells is very simple: we see 12-year-old Seung Ah Moon and Jung Hae Sung, the same age, in Soul, two children who decide they are in love and hold hands under the care of their mothers. We experience the two twelve years later, they are on Facebook, go into a communication frenzy via Skype, become addicted, Seung Ah Moon now calls herself Nora Moon and Nora slows down before anything like love can pass.

Then she meets the writer Arthur, who is writing a novel called Boner, and they get married. When Nora and Hae Sung are in their mid thirties, he flies to New York, they see each other and do what they used to do on Skype, they have outrageous relationship conversations and come to their conclusions.

Words, looks and moods arise that anyone who has ever been in love in life recognizes, the feeling that the other has taken root not just in one, but many layers of life, the confidence, the desire, the damn hopelessness. Realizing that you cannot absolutely love just one person.

As in Wong Kar-Wai’s classic “In the Mood for Love,” Nora and Hae Sung are one of those reserved, super-controlled couples alien to Western sentimentality. Arthur is very different. But the most sensitive character of the three is Hae Sung.

Actor Teo Yoo says he is an infinitely melancholy person and has always been looking for a “master” who can create “a vessel for this melancholy”. He has found his master in Celine Song, you can’t make a lover more tenderly sad than Hae Sung.

Teo Yoo always says poetic things in interviews. The eye, he says, is the most sensitive part of the surface of a human body, and he has tried to make the eye Hae Sung’s organ of speech. what to say He does it beautifully with his eyes, they are really very eloquent. He copied the rest of his body language from the boy who played Hae Sung as a child. He always stood there like his arms were glued to his body, says Teo Yoo, who he adopted. As if Hae Sung’s wings were stuck on it.

Woven from such silky threads of poetry is ‘Past Lives’, beautifully supported by the backdrops of Seoul and New York and a large amount of Korean food. At first everything seems very easy, but in the end you want to sob out loud in the cinema, the restrained tension is so great that it eventually discharges. A film like a love poem. You should definitely do such a thing for your own good.

“Past Lives” can now be seen in many cinemas.