Sundance Review: Celine Song’s ‘Past Lives’
deadline.comThe word “romantic” doesn’t have much place in cinema these days, serving mostly as a modifier for “comedy”. The term “women’s picture” has also passed out of favor since its ’40s heyday, regardless of the fact that the films that exemplified it usually featured strong female characters and almost always pushed back at the pressures of male-run society.
With her feature debut Past Lives, which screened to a double standing ovation this week in the Premieres strand at Sundance, playwright Celine Song has killed two birds with one stone, creating an elegant and unexpectedly mesmerizing character piece that speaks profoundly to the concept of love in the modern age while using an intelligent and ambitious, but still very relatable woman to do so.
Surprisingly, the film comes from A24, whose recent output has been heading in a very different and more genre-focused direction, and also Killer Films, historically known for much edgier fare.
But Killer’s long-standing relationship with Todd Haynes might be more significant here; there’s a nostalgic mood to Past Lives, one that recalls the Velvet Goldmine director’s conceptual experiments, and though it is roughly set in the present, Song’s film has a strangely old-fashioned air to it.
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