Past Lives
I am legitimately struggling to articulate why Past Lives did not quite resonate with me the way it did with so many others. I found it beautiful without being indulgent — the lighting in the third act bar, for instance, or the long, luxurious tracking shot to close out the film are both stunning. The triptych of lead performances are all extremely solid, perhaps most of all that of John Magaro playing Arthur. The films that this is in conversation with — lost-in-translation and In the Mood for Love — are major touchstones for me.
And yet something just didn't quite hit, and left the film merely at the status of admiration rather than love.
Perhaps it was the neatness of the framing device and the way we don't quite spend enough time with our central character in any one era to have a really strong and intimate understanding of who they were and are. Song, playwright by training, deploys a bizarre barbell of extreme economy punctuated by monologue. Nora, her autofictional insert, is an oddly thin character — she has little chemistry with either of the male leads and little interiority beyond that of her career goals. This might be the pleasantness of the film's aesthetic working against it: in a quest to make every shot subdued and beautiful, Song smooths away the knots and edges that make things feel alive.
That's too harsh for how I feel — this was a lovely film, just left me a little colder than I was expecting.