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| Réalisé par Celine Song |
| États-Unis / Corée du Sud, 2023 (fiction, 106 minutes, couleurs, anglais / coréen) |
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Autres |
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| Image : © Entract Films |
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Description du film [en anglais] : « A budding childhood romance between Nora and Hae Sung, classmates at a primary school in Seoul, ends abruptly when Nora's family emigrates to Canada. Twelve years later, Nora, now a playwriting student in New York, notices that Hae Sung's been searching social media for her. They reconnect online, begin talking frequently, and even imagine a reunion. But another dozen years pass before they finally meet over a few fateful days during his visit to New York. Although their lives have changed dramatically, they remain bound by a wistful connection. An aching, deeply romantic debut feature from playwright Celine Song (Endlings), Past Lives is a love story—indeed, several—told across three moments in time. Song's artful aesthetic and profound character writing, and the spellbinding performances she draws from Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, and John Magaro (whose fates intertwine) explore love, identity, and 'In Yun,' a Korean notion of fate stemming from two people's connection in a past life. It's that rarest of works that transports us, impossibly, to someplace deep in our souls, in between a life we've longed for and the life we live. » -- Sundance Film Festival (source) |
| Générique (partiel) : | |
| Scénario : | Celine Song |
| Produit par : | David Hinojosa, Pamela Koffler, Christine Vachon, Yale Chasin, Khan Kwon, Young Woo Suh, Christine D'Souza Gelb, Hosung Kang, Jerry Kyoungboum Ko, Miky Lee, Taylor Shung, Yeonu Choi |
| Interprètes principaux : | Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro, Moon Seung-ah, Leem Seung-min, Ji Hye Yoon, Won Young Choi, Ahn Min-Young, Seo Yeon-Woo, Kiha Chang, Shin Hee-Chul, Jun Hyuk Park, Jack Alberts, Jane Kim, Noo Ri Song, Si Ah Jin, Yoon Seo Choi, Seung Un Hwang, Jojo T. Gibbs, Emily Cass McDonnell, Federico Rodriguez, Conrad Schott, Kristen Sieh, Oge Agulué |
| Images : | Shabier Kirchner |
| Montage images : | Keith Fraase |
| Musique : | Christopher Bear, Daniel Rossen |
| Société de production : | CJ ENM, 2AM, Killer Films, A24 |
« I wanted the audience [of Past Lives] to feel there is a very real argument for why she [Nora] should stay [with Arthur], the way there is a very real argument for Hae Sung. I don't want the arguments to be lopsided. I want them to be even. »
-- Celine Song
(source)
« My costume designer [for Past Lives] is a Canadian who lives in New York and L.A., so we spent a lot of time talking about the kind of clothing we were wearing when we moved from Canada in the 1990s. Not just Canada, but the suburbs. You see Nora at grad school wearing a Niagara Falls T-shirt, and she wears a necklace with a little bird that we thought felt so Canadian, whatever that means. »
-- Celine Song
(source)
« Bien que Past Lives soit son premier film, Celine Song démontre une maîtrise peu commune du langage cinématographique. Son sens de l'image est exquis : tous ces panoramas urbains nocturnes, ce crépuscule champêtre aux cieux pastel avec silhouettes en contrejour, un clin d'oeil à Gone with the Wind (Autant en emporte le vent). »
-- François Lévesque
(source)
« Past Lives is a wistful what-if story about two people, the children they were and the adults they become. The movie follows them through the years and across assorted reunions, separations and continents as well as milestones momentous and ordinary. It's a tale of friendship, love, regret and what it means to truly live here and now. In a sense it is a time-travel movie, because even as the two characters keep moving forward, they remain inexorably tethered to the past, which means it's also a story about everyday life. »
-- Manohla Dargis
(source)
« As [Celine] Song follows the unusual trio of Nora, Hae Sung and Arthur across one weekend in New York—each person carefully dancing around their own feelings, as concerned for the other as they are for themselves—the filmmaker builds a romantic drama [Past Lives] in which audiences are just as invested in seeing two people kiss as they are in actively hoping they don't do anything of the sort. Song is attempting a delicate balance of character and genre expectations here, and the wonderfully surprising thing is she pretty much pulls it off. All with a sense of kind humour that feels strong and even courageous, given how deeply the material is mined from Song's own life. »
-- Barry Hertz
(source)
« Celine Song makes a quietly spectacular writing-directing debut with Past Lives, a lyrical slow burn of a film that expertly holds back wellsprings of emotion, until it unleashes a deluge. The premise is deceptively simple: Nora and Hae Sung are childhood sweethearts growing up together in South Korea when her parents move the family to Canada. Twelve years later, when Nora is in her 20s and trying to make it as a writer in New York, the two reconnect online. This could be the start of a meet-cute-take-two worthy of that other Nora, i.e. Ephron. But Song is not interested in rom-com confections here. Following Nora as she follows her dreams, played with self-possession and dry wit by a revelatory Greta Lee, Song tells a new but achingly familiar kind of love story. She also traces the contradictory contours of female ambition as it changes, and too often shrinks, over time. »
-- Ann Hornaday
(source)
« The leap from stage to screen has been treacherous for so many talented playwrights [...]. But as writer, [Celine] Song manages to keep her dialogue believably light-footed and spare while as director, she confidently and evocatively captures both cities [Seoul and New York] with a breadth that belies her inexperience. It's a beautiful, transporting film but one made with both feet firmly on the ground. Romantic movies as unashamed about their themes as this one, too often treat love and fate as overly mystical and ultimately impractical, allowing smart characters to act in stupid ways, but despite Song's very title referring to a Korean notion of our past lives intertwining to draw us closer together in the present, she always remains clear-eyed about the reality of such thinking. »
-- Benjamin Lee
(source)
« What I loved from the jump with this movie [Past Lives] was it wasn't in service of any sort of gaze: white gaze, male gaze. It was really liberated from the certain systems and infrastructures in place. It really is all in service of this universal idea of love. Love not as some sort of neat construct, but something that exists on its own. »
-- Greta Lee
(source)
« [Celine] Song reveals herself to be a fully formed filmmaker with this accomplished debut. She shows a visual command to match her emotional and philosophical insights, a pleasingly understated wit and a grasp of tone that never falters, enhanced by the delicate chiming synths of a score by Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen, from indie rock band Grizzly Bear. The fluency with which the writer-director moves between time periods and distant places is impressive indeed, with invaluable help from Keith Fraase's supple editing. For a movie in which the characters often dance around their feelings without directly addressing them, Past Lives speaks volumes. It's only January, but there's no doubt [Past Lives] will be one of the best films of the year. »
-- David Rooney
(source)
« Near the beginning of Celine Song's brilliant debut film Past Lives, two little Korean girls are choosing their English names as part of the family preparation for immigration to Canada. Na Young, age 12, can't quite settle on one; they all sound ridiculous to her. But then her father suggests 'Lenore,' Nora for short, and she likes the sound of that. She'll be Nora. In this new place, she'll be someone new. But she is leaving someone behind: Hae Sung, her closest friend, perhaps an innocent sweetheart. They compete for grades and walk home from school together, and when she leaves he's quietly devastated. The future, for him, has changed shape. Past Lives is a miraculous little film from A24, steady and slow and haunted, in the existential sense, by possibilities. »
-- Alissa Wilkinson
(source)
« In bundling the issues of identity, cultural ties, and rootlessness to love interests, [Past Lives] shrinks them down into something that feels negligible, and then tries to give itself added heft with the idea of inyun—the connection between people built up over all their past lives. When Nora first explains inyun to Arthur under those warm lights at night at the retreat, she jokes that the spiritual concept is 'just something Koreans say to seduce someone.' By the time the idea of inyun comes back up in earnest, it feels like it's actually the audience that's being had. »
-- Alison Willmore
(source)
« During rehearsal, Celine [Song] never wanted Greta [Lee] and I to touch. I'd go in for a hug or to shake her hand, and she would say, 'No, save it for the screen.' So when you see us meet in New York for the first time in 24 years, that's actually the first time we ever touched, so we yearned for each other. I had this really visceral feeling [while shooting]—my palms were sweating and my heart was pounding out of my chest. I'm really grateful the audience gets to experience that, too. »
-- Teo Yoo
(source)
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